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More "Smug" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... must have happened. I suspect the custom-house officers that the authorities have insisted on keeping aboard us all the time that we have been in harbour; but of course I have not said a word to them about it. I have, however, watched them continually, and by their smug looks of satisfaction I am inclined to believe that they know something about it. And ever since then I have been on the prowl everywhere to see if I could find any trace of the boat, but ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood
... the greater world reformers of all sorts have not infrequently in times of scarcity and danger been taken by their proteges for the authors of their trials and stoned, whilst the smug Government which caused the ruin, well bolstered up in the affection of its 'taxables', chuckled, serenely confident in the unending folly of mankind. Most certainly the Jesuits struggled to do their duty to their neophytes in what they thought they ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham
... herself, aware of something almost ludicrously pitiful in the smug tearful countenance and stumpy would-be fashionable figure. Hit a man your own size, or bigger, by all means if you are game to take the consequences. But to smite a creature conspicuously your inferior in fortune—past, present, and ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... Again that smug look of generosity beamed on the man's face. Once more Jim motioned him to go, but Mosher did not heed. He thought the gesture was a refusal. His face grew threatening. "All right, if you won't," he snarled, "look out! ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... all his days. Therefore Sapt let Mr. Rassendyll doubt and struggle, while he himself wrote his story and laid his long-headed plans. And now and then James, the little servant, came in and went out, sedate and smug, but with a quiet satisfaction gleaming in his eyes. He had made a story for a pastime, and it was being translated into history. He at least would bear his part ...
— Rupert of Hentzau - From The Memoirs of Fritz Von Tarlenheim: The Sequel to - The Prisoner of Zenda • Anthony Hope
... "Smug it!" said Mercer, with a comical look, "when he knew. Look! see that open ground there with the clump of fir-trees and the long slope of sand going ...
— Burr Junior • G. Manville Fenn
... the world knows, but his oddity is far more amusing than repulsive, far more playful than bearish. Yates's picture of him last year was not bad; neither was it good—it wanted the raciness of the original. Let the reader imagine a smug, elderly, sleek, and venerable-looking man, approaching seventy years of age, rather (as novel-writers say) below than above the middle height, somewhat inclined to corpulency, and upright in his carriage withal; ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 341, Saturday, November 15, 1828. • Various
... this might be forgiven on the plea that where so many names of the strong and powerful bid for recognition, a good way to avoid jealousies, is to ignore them all. So speaks proud and pious Philadelphia—snug, smug, prosperous, priggish and pedantic Philadelphia. But how about these five supremely great names—William Penn, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, Stephen Girard and ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... dote on the Milky Way. The clouds are as soft as a fleecy rug, And as cool as cool can be. The skies fit into my figure snug, And they make me feel so blithe and smug That I am glad Fate made me Me. Oh Me! Ah Me! 'Tis a lovely fate And a mission great To be Like me And to love the skies, And the clouds to prize, And to hate the turbulent sea, He—he— So I lift my voice And I loud rejoice That the Fates have made ...
— Andiron Tales • John Kendrick Bangs
... as a UFO source, the idea of interplanetary spaceships was becoming more popular. During 1948 the people in ATIC were openly discussing the possibility of interplanetary visitors without others tapping their heads and looking smug. During 1948 the novelty of UFO's had worn off for the press and every John and Jane Doe who saw one didn't make the front pages as in 1947. Editors were becoming hardened, only a few of the best reports got any space. Only "The Classics" rated headlines. "The Classics" were three historic ...
— The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects • Edward Ruppelt
... adoption. He holds the only way to save the State Is Temperance, enforced by Local Option. Spirited Foreign Policy? Anon! Fiscal Economy? Quite secondary! All is no use till the Drink-Demon's gone! BUNG, who so loved him, feels his colour vary; And, while he perorates to all men's wonder. Smug WILFRID smiles and whispers, "That's ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 1, 1890 • Various
... the affair came to their attention, would move not at all against us," went on Ichi, smug pleasure in his voice. "Indeed, the chartered company might even reward us for removing one of such dangerousness as Captain Dabney from their trade reserves. And if you suppose my Government would act, I fear you underestimate with greatness the powerfulness of my connections in my country. No, ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... problem of the women who would not work. These were either of the industrial class, or of that petite bourgeoisie whose husbands, called to the colors, had been small clerks and had made just enough to keep their usually childless wives in a certain smug comfort. ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... "stirrings of the heart," at the beginning of the second quarter of the eighteenth century a cold, formal piety was frequently the covering of indifferent living and of a smug, complacent Christianity, wherein the letter killed and the spirit did not give life. This was true all over New England, and elsewhere. Nor was this deadness confined to the colonies alone, for the Wesleys were soon to stir the sluggish ...
— The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut • M. Louise Greene, Ph. D.
... to go back and have another look at that bronze statue; I was becoming desperately afraid that I had been too hasty in my inspection of it—that I had under-estimated it. I was very young, heedless, self-esteemed and smug, and had hardly paused to pay a moment's tribute to it. I felt that Albert of Cologne was standing there, absorbed, proud, erect, and defiant, waiting for me to find my ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... let thy white be black, and thy black white, and I myself will deliver thee, and make thee rich, and heal thy hurts, save the holes in thy ears, that I may know thee for mine own." But Daniel gave no heed to him. So the Devil departed, having great wrath, and entered into a certain smug-faced man ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... The smug, mysterious gentleman who made this picture was much pleased, apparently at nothing more than that he had proved that I had a clutch of the heart, which I had announced, by wire, before ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... "Vacation!" The word was not in his vocabulary. "Business! "That, too, was a corpse of a word floating on the still waters of past usage. "Money, stocks, bonds, market-reports!" They seemed like forgotten enemies rising to stop him. How could Delbridge smile in his smug way, as he chewed his cigar and boasted of a new club of which he was the president? How could Wright put up with his moderate salary and stand all day at that prison window? What could the limp, pale-faced stenographers ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... of an old friend o' mine, South of Ireland—to help his widie. That's got it. Good idee. Very good idee. Charity and business—what they like. Micky Mahon, his name was. Died o'—I must have it all pat on the tongue. What did he die of, Brand? You're an artful little feller, settin' there so smug and secret like a hen crocodile a-hatchin' h'out ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant
... of incalculable power, in the era which ended with the Civil War. The New Englander of the Middle West, however, ceased to be altogether a Yankee. The lake and prairie plains bred a spirit which contrasted strongly with the smug provincialism of rock-ribbed and sterile New England. The exultation born of wide, unbroken, horizon lines and broad, teeming, prairie landscapes, found expression in the often-quoted saying, "Vermont is the most glorious spot on the face of this globe for a ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... we were building our smug little house of Social Security, the whole world was crashing around us. Instead of achieving local security we find ourselves now in the midst of world-wide insecurity. Far from having eliminated the economic causes of fear, we now find these causes multiplied ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... Lay long talking with pleasure with my wife, and so up and to the Office with Tom, who looks mighty smug upon his marriage, as Jane also do, both of whom I did give joy, and so Tom and I at work at the Office all the morning, till dinner, and then dined, W. Batelier with us; and so after dinner to work again, and sent for Gibson, and kept him also till eight at night, ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... man, no longer the smug gentleman in a black suit, with a visage as prim as his neck-cloth, but blazing in a red woollen shirt, and grinning incessantly with amazement at his own metamorphosis. Strapped to his waist by a broad belt of leather, was a large tin-kettle, for the purpose of making ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... talking under a heavy handicap. Homer, long ago, found us garrulous, and compared us to cicadas chirping unprofitably in the city-gate. In the modern time, too, Dr. Holmes, ensconced in smug youth, could "sit and grin" at one of our kind ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... because we were going after the "Chosen People" in literature. It was Leslie Stephen who said, "The term Philistine is a word used by prigs to designate people they do not like." When you call a man a bad name, you are that thing—not he. The Smug and Snugly Ensconced Denizens of Union Square called me a Philistine, and I said, "Yes, I am one, if a Philistine is something ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... greeted Hughie warmly. Miss Maggie flashed her dazzling teeth; Teeters reached out and smote him with his fist between the shoulder blades; Mrs. Taylor laid her hand upon his arm with her large smug air of patronizing friendliness, and, stooping, beamed into ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... her eyes beseechingly. Now, as she saw the smug mockery on her captor's face, she fell silent. The futility of any pleading was too plain. Her eyes shifted to the ground again. But the first wild fear was past, and she began to think with some clearness. At once, it occurred to her ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... tricks for his own disport. He lived and died in the reign of Henry the Seventh, says the book of his merry pranks." The book Weever refers to is a pamphlet, now very scarce, called "The Life and Death of the Merry Devil of Edmonton, with the Pleasant Pranks of Smug the Smith, &c." These pleasant pranks compose the greater part of the book, which informs us that Peter Fabell was born at Edmonton, and lived and died there in the reign of Henry VII. He is called "an excellent scholar, and well seene in ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 578 - Vol. XX, No. 578. Saturday, December 1, 1832 • Various
... mermaids were examining and admiring their room, Cap'n Bill went to the Peony Room to see what it was like and found his quarters were very cozy and interesting. There were pictures on the wall, portraits of grave-looking porpoises, bashful seals, and smug and smiling walruses. Some of the wall panels were formed of mirrors and reflected clearly the interior of the room. Around the ceiling was a frieze of imitation peonies in silver, and the furniture was ...
— The Sea Fairies • L. Frank Baum
... we had passed the Red Lily lagoons, and ridden across the salt-bush plain, and through a deep belt of tall, newly sprung green grass, that hugged the river there just then, and having been greeted by smug, smiling old black fellows, were saluting Jack across two or three hundred feet of water, as we stood among ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... smug reasonings the bare facts were these: East St. Louis, a great industrial center, lost 5,000 laborers,—good, honest, hard-working laborers. It was not the criminals, either black or white, who were driven from East St. Louis. They are still there. They will ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... table was set for Doggie's dinner. Phineas looked round him in surprise. The heterogeneous and tasteless furniture, the dreadful Mid-Victorian prints on the walls—one was the "Return of the Guards from the Crimea," representing the landing from the troop-ship, repellent in its smug unreality, the coarse glass and well-used plate on the table, the crumpled napkin in a ring (for Marmaduke who in his mother's house had never been taught to dream that a napkin could possibly be used for two consecutive meals!), the ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... my fellow-passenger, "that when you offer me the salt I accept it. Why should I deprive you of one of the little complacencies of unselfishness? You see, my dear Sir, either you are to feel smug all over, or I am. Now, if I take the salt—so—I perform a true act of courtesy; but, if I postpone the salt, saying 'After you,' I at once enter into the lists, jousting with you for the prize of self-satisfaction. With my two friends ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 29, 1914 • Various
... was no official news. Even the Greek newspapers called it rumors. Actually, it was leaked information. It would be reasonable for the Greek government to let it leak, look smug, and blandly say "No comment" to all inquiries, including ...
— The Invaders • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... an open road, made of faith a reasonable thing, yet did not rob it of a sense of high adventure; cleansed it of the taints of thrift and selfish concern. In this reaffirmation of vitalism there might be a future, yes, an individual future, yet it was far from the smug conception of salvation. Here was a faith conferred by the freedom of truth; a faith that lost and regained itself in life; it was dynamic in its operation; for, as Lessing said, the searching after ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... attempt at grace, it threw over the style of the "Newcastle School"—of which Landells was a member—and gave the general idea of the latest of all covers. This was not executed until January, 1849, when several changes of detail were made, including the substitution of the smug lion's head for that of Judy in the canvas—the whole so successful that it may safely be predicted that it will ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... on which he stood, looked over my shoulder. Dinner was about to be served. The women had come out. The table-lamps threw their rosy glow over white necks and uncovered arms, and revealed, higher in the shadows, the faces of the men, smug, clean-shaven, assured, rather heavy. ...
— The After House • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... towards the pantry. Why the verandah? wondered Mr. Twist. He hurried to intercept her. Anyhow she wasn't either about to cry or getting over having done it. He saw that at once with relief. Nor was she, it would seem, in any sort of distress. On the contrary, Anna-Felicitas looked particularly smug. He saw that once too, with surprise,—why smug? wondered Mr. Twist. She had a pleased look of complete satisfaction on her face. She was oblivious, he noticed, as she passed between the tables, of the guests who tried in vain to attract her attention and ...
— Christopher and Columbus • Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim
... gnawed at his life strings. One night, with twitching fingers and face drawn white with pain, he turned away from the crowded streets towards Westminster, sank into a seat, and, picking up the half of a newspaper, read the smug little account of a journalist who had spent a few hours a day perhaps in the slums. As he read he laughed softly to himself, and then, clutching the paper in his hands, he walked away to the Embankment, up Northumberland Avenue, and into the Strand. After a few inquiries ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim
... there now, staring at the smug young medical politicians and the tired old general practitioners filing in and out. One of the latter halted, fumbled in his pocket and drew out ...
— Badge of Infamy • Lester del Rey
... listened knew that every word came from the speaker's soul, from the magazine of truth. Some London slum had been his cradle, the gutters of the great city the only University his feet had known, the costers' dialect was native to his tongue; yet no smug Churchman crowned with the laurels of the schools could so have stirred the blood of those wild lads, fresh from the boundless bush and lawless mining ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... could prove, even to himself, that he had not disposed of those alien remains and then come back to his bubble, contented and happy at the thought of fooling those smug idiots ...
— The Planet with No Nightmare • Jim Harmon
... and squeak! Blessedest Thursday's the fat of the week. Rumble and tumble, sleek and rough, Stinking and savory, smug and gruff, Take the church-road, for the bell's due chime Gives us ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... a thing. No; don't contradict me! It's rude. I'm that, and several other things besides. I'd no idea I was so much in the grip of the East. It's a curious thing. One feels it in the blood. It's six years—more—since I climbed on to the shelf, and I've been quite smug and self-satisfied most of the time. There's been a twinge of regret every now and then, but nothing I couldn't whistle away. But now—" his words quickened; he spoke them whimsically, yet passionately, in her ear—"between ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... SMUG LAY. Persons who pretend to be smugglers of lace and valuable articles; these men borrow money of publicans by depositing these goods in their hands; they shortly decamp, and the publican discovers too late that he has been duped; and on opening the ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... the story of le Garou, as he was called by some, although I speak of these things as locally familiar, it is very sure that to many citizens of the town they were quite unknown. The smug shopkeeper on the main street had scarcely heard of him until the day after the final scene at the slaughter-house, when his great carcass was carried to Hine's taxidermist shop and there mounted, to be exhibited later at the Chicago World's Fair, and to be destroyed, ...
— Animal Heroes • Ernest Thompson Seton
... passionately). The truth—Oh, God! what do you know about the truth? Your business is crawling up into a little power, that you may use it by tantalizing, morally and physically, people a thousand times better than you.... You sit there in your smug authority torturing people. ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al
... in from golf, with the smug smile of one who has played a good round, on his face. His buggy boy, Cornelius Twombly, a black imp of twelve, who carried a razor in his hip pocket, wore also the smug look of one who has caddied to victory, and won certain ...
— We Three • Gouverneur Morris
... better place for us all. But somehow this doesn't apply to the mass, and particularly not to the circles we invaded in Granville. With here and there a solitary exception that class is hopeless in its smug self-satisfaction—its narrowness of outlook, and unblushing exploitation of the ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... this is by no means a large class—the grave, dignified, self-possessed, well-mannered waiter; smooth-shaven, spotlessly clean, noiseless, smug and attentive. He generally walks with a slight limp, an infirmity due to his sedentary habits and his long acquaintance with his several employers' decanters. He is never under fifty, is round of form, short in the legs, broad of shoulder, and wears his gray hair ...
— The Underdog • F. Hopkinson Smith
... characteristics of an old book should be preserved, and that the new work should be as little in evidence as possible. It is far more pleasant to see an old book in a patched contemporary binding, than smug and tidy in ...
— Bookbinding, and the Care of Books - A handbook for Amateurs, Bookbinders & Librarians • Douglas Cockerell
... face into smug folly by way of illustration. Then she and Geoffrey laughed together. "I vow you're the most deliciously wicked creature that ever was born ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey
... wanted to strike the smug Pharisee in the face, and in order to conquer that unwomanly impulse I hurried out of the office, and into the street, leaving poor ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... with it. You must have faith. You must just believe what you're told not think at all. Thinking is wickedness—unless you think what you hear preached." Feather was even a trifle delicately smug as she rattled off her orthodoxy—but she laughed after she had done with it. "But it MUST have been funny—a Turk or a Hindoo in a turban and a thing like a tea gown and Mrs. Muir in her Edinburgh looking ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Grange Lane. The great people were infatuated about that snuffy old Scotchman—a man behind his day, who had rusted and grown old among the soft diseases of Carlingford, where sharp practice was so seldom necessary; and no opening appeared for young Rider except in the new district, in the smug corner house, with the surgery and the red lamp, and M.R.C.S. on a brass plate on ...
— The Doctor's Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... action. Now she seemed to count for little more than a bundle, of more or less value, that, having been secured, could wait its time for utility. Yet, before she had telescoped her vision to extend through and beyond Plimsoll, she had seen devils looking from his eyes, smug devils, but none the less menacing, risen from the man's own ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... namely—they are to gallop bidden being ridden, bestridden and chidden by whip and spur applied by certain trusty men o' my company, which men go habited, decked, dressed, clad, guised and disguised as smug, sleek ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... it is, I think, easy to see what they meant as applied either by or to Fitzjames. The 'comic writers' for him were exponents of the petty and vulgar ideals of the lower middle classes of the day. The world of Dickens's novels was a portrait of the class for which Dickens wrote. It was a world of smug little tradesmen of shallow and half-educated minds, with paltry ambitions, utter ignorance of history and philosophy, shrinking instinctively from all strenuous thought and resenting every attack upon the placid optimism in which it delighted to wrap ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... Julia said to herself, raising herself on one elbow to punch her sodden pillow, and sending a hot, restless glance toward the streak of bright light that forced its way in from a street lamp. How selfish, how smug, how arrogant they were, with their daily baths, and their chests full of fresh linen, and their assured speech! What had Sally and Theodora Toland ever done to warrant their insufferable conceit? Why should they have lovely parents and an ideal home, ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... southern-western counties of Wiltshire and Hants as Hardy chose Wessex for his peculiar venue, he described the clerical life of his land as it had never been described before, showing the type as made up of men like unto other men, unromantic, often this-worldly and smug, yet varying the type, making room for such an idealist as Crawley as well as for sleek bishops and ecclesiastical wire-pullers. Neither his young women nor his holy men are overdrawn a jot: they have the continence of Nature. But they are ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... a type. He cares about adventures rightly. He's certain that our smug existence isn't all. He's vulgar and hysterical and bookish, but I don't think that sums him up. There's manhood in him as well. Yes, that's what I'm trying to say. ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... servant that officiated at these orgies. The visitors, indeed, were by no means of the turbulent stamp of their predecessors; but quiet, mysterious traders, full of nods, and winks, and hieroglyphic signs, with whom, to use their cant phrase, "every thing was smug." Their ships came to anchor at night in the lower bay; and, on a private signal, Vanderscamp would launch his boat, and accompanied solely by his man Pluto, would make them mysterious visits. Sometimes boats pulled in at night, in front of the Wild Goose, and various ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... upon every department of her social organisation, it required both courage and discernment to raise the warning voice and to apply the wet blanket. But Nietzsche did both, and with spirit, because his worst fears were aroused. Smug content (erbrmliches Behagen) was threatening to thwart his one purpose—the elevation of man; smug content personified in the German scholar was giving itself airs of omniscience, omnipotence, and ubiquity, and all the while ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... whole; but his subsequent ambitions appeared even worse. For the first time, he perceived his own consummate selfishness set over against the shining renunciations of his mother. Then, step by step, he followed his career in Brookville: his smug satisfaction in his own good looks; his shallow pride and vanity over the vapid insincerities he had perpetrated Sunday after Sunday in the shabby pulpit of the Brookville church; his Pharisaical relations with his people; ...
— An Alabaster Box • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Florence Morse Kingsley
... enough to have to flatter Clayton's opponent, to picture him as a noble, disinterested character, ready to sacrifice himself for the public weal. Into his pictures of this man, attired in the long black coat of conventional respectability, with the smug face of pharisaism, he could get nothing but cant and hypocrisy; but in his caricatures of Clayton there was that which pained him worse—disloyalty, untruth, and now and then, to the discerning few who knew the tragedy of Kittrell's soul, there was pity. And thus his ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... My father's name is Abimelech Henley! A's a cunnin warm old codger—A tell her that—And says you, here Missee says you am I, at your onnurable Ladyship's reverend sarvice. My father has a got the rhino—A don't forget to tell her that—Smug and snug and all go snacks—Do you mind me? And so, says you, I have a paradventerd umbelly to speak my foolish thofts, says you. That is take me ritely, your Ladyship, says you; under your Ladyship's purtection and currection, and every think ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... upon the age of the great religious conflict one of astounding ebb of spiritual interest. Men turned with all energy to the political and economic interests of a wholly modern civilisation. They retained, after a short period of friction, a smug and latitudinarian orthodoxy, which Methodism did little to change. In France not only was the Huguenot Church annihilated, but the Jansenist movement was savagely suppressed. The tyranny of the Bourbon State and the corruption of the Gallican Church which was so ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... Governor and the Lieutenant-Governor adjoined. Each had its ante-room, in which a private secretary wrote eternally at a roll-top desk, an excessively plain-featured stenographer rattled the keys of his typewriter, and a smug-faced page yawned over a newspaper, or scanned the cards of visitors with the air of an official censor. At intervals, an electric bell whirred once, twice, or three times; and, according to the signal, ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... talked like this, until to-day. Oh, he's told me a little, from time to time. But to- day, to-day, he just poured out his heart to me—ME!—and there are so many who need just that message to stir them from their smug complacency—men who could fight, and win: men who WOULD fight, and win, if only they could see and hear and know, as I saw and heard and knew this afternoon. And there it was, wasted, WASTED, ...
— Dawn • Eleanor H. Porter
... look so queer? I don't like you. Be nice to me." There was something terribly wrong with the smug little phrases, or with any words at all just then, there in the heart of the silent dark, and facing the strangeness of the boy's eyes; words failed her suddenly, and she pulled her hands away, and hid her face in them. "I won't go with ...
— The Wishing Moon • Louise Elizabeth Dutton
... loathsome story, sordid, brutal, sickening! Dull callousness to smug contrition quickening Under the spur of an ignoble terror, A hope scarce less ignoble—in expression, At least. Yes, calm judicial self-possession Is difficult, most easy trimming error; But compromise ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, 19 April 1890 • Various
... Macpherson! hail to thee, Sire of Ossian! The Phantom was begotten by the smug embrace of an impudent Highlander upon a cloud of tradition—it travelled southward, where it was greeted with acclamation, and the thin Consistence took its course through Europe, upon the breath of popular applause. The Editor of the Reliques had indirectly preferred ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... Socialists and the Labour men, the Syndicalists and the Communists, the Nationalists and the Internationalists. All those who work for freedom are learning breadth. If they ever find a leader, I think that this dear, smug country of yours may have to face the greatest surprise of ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... As that includes a third interest in our extremely refined and irreproachable business, it would be a deuce of a trick on us if she married one of the common people and set him up amongst us, willy-nilly. We don't want strange bed-fellows. We're too snug—and, I might say, too smug. Down in her heart, mother is saying to herself it would be just like Sara to get even with us by doing just that sort of a trick. Of course, Sara is rich enough without accepting a sou under the will, but she's a canny person. She hasn't ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... women in work and at play; Ye, who do blindly as women may say; Ye, who kill life in the smug cabarets; Ye, all, at the beck of the little tea-tray; Ye, all, of the measure of daughters ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... scuttled to her appointed place. Once More in smothered giggle and unprotesting acquiescence she sensed the resumption of eternal discipline. Already in just this trice of time she felt her rampant young mouth resettle tamely into lines of smug, determinate serenity. Already across her idle lap she felt her clasped fingers begin to frost and tingle again like a cheerfully non-concerned bunch of live wires waiting the one authoritative signal to connect ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... naturalistic novelists. Their materials, as might not be expected, have a sort of primitive power by comparison with which the orthodox native materials of fiction seem often pale and dusty. The older Americans, settled into smug routines, lack the vitality, the industry of the newcomers. They are less direct and more provincial; they are bundled up in gentilities and petty habits; they hide behind old-fashioned reticences which soften the drama of their lives. With the newer stocks an ancient process begins again. Their ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... will die bravely, like a smug bridegroom. What! I will be jovial: come, come, I am a king, My masters, ...
— The Tragedy of King Lear • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... Squat, stout, heavy jowled—with a neck that pushed over the back of his collar—a follower of the ring, smug, assertive, confident. A prophet? I was not ready to ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... every bit of Brass as polished as the most refined Gentleman; the Servants were then running here and there, with merry Hearts and jolly Countenances; every one was busy welcoming of Guests, and look'd as smug as new-lick'd Puppies; the Lasses as blithe and buxom as the maids in good Queen Bess's Days, when they eat Sir-Loins of Roast Beef for Breakfast; Peg would scuttle about to make a Toast for John, while Tom run harum scarum to draw a Jug of ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... of peas, which rattled harmlessly against the long boots of Passepoil. Navailles consulted his oracle, and declared that he liked the big one best. Oriol, with a flourish of his trumpet, announced that he preferred the smug fellow. Peyrolles, with a look of horror on his face, rushed forward and attempted to intercept the new-comers, but he was too late. Cocardasse was already in front of Gonzague, and had made him a tremendous obeisance. "We have the honor ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... been held in check," said a smug voice encouragingly. "Encountered by home-defense troops and artillery, it proved ...
— Morale - A Story of the War of 1941-43 • Murray Leinster
... thirsting for what is interesting and important, to find that "interesting" and "much celebrated" pauperism on his own soil, in conjunction with an opportunity of making people talk about him afresh. How smug he must have felt at the news that henceforth he possessed his "own" Royal ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... whole thing's so mad that if I wait till then I'll never want to do it. And you've got to come, so that I'll have some one to quarrel with.... I hate the smugness of London, especially the smugness of the anti-smug anti-bourgeois radicals, so that I have the finest mad mood! ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... on his return. It was a rash vow, I am ready to admit. Yet rash as it was, I do not find it in my heart to be severely critical of him. I rather join with Dr. Peck in my admiration. You know what is the matter with a great many of us smug church members? We are so prudent. We have such admirable possession of all our faculties. We are in danger of dying of self-control. This man in the white heat of his enthusiasm made a solemn pledge to the Lord of that ...
— Sermons on Biblical Characters • Clovis G. Chappell
... work-distorted, maybe bibulous-looking mother, exchanging that resounding and ungraceful kiss at the hospital gate. I have heard Bert shout "Mother!" from a hundred yards off, when he spied her coming through the gate. No false shame there! No smug "good form" in that—nor in the time-honoured jest which follows: "And 'ave you remembered to bring me a bottle of beer, mother?" (Of course visitors are not allowed to introduce alcohol into the hospital—otherwise ...
— Observations of an Orderly - Some Glimpses of Life and Work in an English War Hospital • Ward Muir
... he might some time, perhaps, approach her again? Some time! after she had forgotten him, after his unworthiness had been proved to her, and some other fellow, some happier man who had never been exposed to such a fate as had fallen upon him, some smug Pharisee (this fling at the supposed rival of the future was very natural and harmed nobody) had cut him out of all place in her heart! It was so likely that Chatty would go on waiting for him, thinking of him, for years perhaps, ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... evening," said Lee, but he got no rejoinder to that. He looked at the company, and his small, smug, fatuous face, which was somewhat pale and haggard, frowned with astonishment. Again he looked for information into Carroll's unanswering face. He looked at an empty chair near him; then he looked at Carroll and his sister standing, and did not seat himself. ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... qualifying first he had obtained an appointment as travelling physician to an American, a prominent member of the New York smart set, a man of twenty-two, a motorist, a yachtsman, clean shaved as an actor and smug as a butler, one of those men who make the great American nation so small in the eyes of the world—the world that cannot see beyond the servants' hall antics of New York society to the great plains where ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... in comparison with the cold bow which the two colleagues exchanged at the Chamber, an "I was expecting you" in which perhaps an intention showed itself, the lawyer pointed the Nabob into a seat near his desk, told the smug domestic in black not to come till he was summoned, arranged a few papers, after which, sinking into his arm-chair with the attitude of a man ready to listen, who becomes all ears, his legs crossed, he rested his chin on his hand, with his eyes ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... with extravagant hopes. A few, it is true, lived to become substantial cities buzzing with the American spirit, panting, fighting for progress with an energy that shamed the Old World, lethargic in its smug and self-sufficient superiority. But many towns died in their gangling youth, tragic monuments to hopes; but monuments also to effort, and to the pioneer courage and the dreams ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer
... appearance is a creditable small American city—the kind of city smug people show their friends with pride from the rose-scented tranquility of a super-six in passage. The streets are wide and clean, the buildings comfortable, the lawns and shade trees attractive. Centralia is somewhat of a coquette but she is as sinister and cowardly as she ...
— The Centralia Conspiracy • Ralph Chaplin
... short. 'I don't doubt your motives. I know too well how ready you are to sacrifice yourself. But it does fill me with a kind of rage to see some of those smug Settlement workers, the people that plume themselves on leaving luxurious homes. They don't say how hideously bored they were in them. They are perfectly enchanted at the excitement and importance they get out of going to live among the ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... inside the side door, on the right as you enter, and might easily be overlooked. Over the dead Christ bend women in grief; a younger woman stands by the cross, in agony; and in a corner are kneeling, very smug, the two donors, Federigo da Montefeltro and ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... its light shut out by the adjoining extensions, prevented it; so did the glimpse of hard asphalt covering the scrap of a yard, its four melancholy posts hung about with wire clothes-lines; and so did the clean-shaven, smug-faced butler, who invariably conducted his master's guests to their chairs with the movement of an undertaker, and who had never been known to crack a smile of any kind, long or short, during his five years' sojourn ...
— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith
... severely by their liability to make mistakes. To this we reply—first, that we should have liked to see any person attempting to pass a bad note or a light guinea upon Ellish after nine or ten years' experience; we should like to have seen a smug clerk taking his pen from behind his ear, and after making his calculation, on inquiring from Ellish if she had reckoned up the amount, compelled to ascertain the error which she pointed out to him. The most remarkable point in her whole character, was the rapid ...
— Phil Purcel, The Pig-Driver; The Geography Of An Irish Oath; The Lianhan Shee • William Carleton
... time, and was then rewarded by the sight of the respectable-looking butler. His face appeared—or I imagined it,—even more smug than before in its expression, and there was something suggestive of injured ...
— The House by the Lock • C. N. Williamson
... maggots madden me. "I know you for what you are, and I am unafraid. Under your mask of hedonism you are yourself the Noseless One and your way leads to the Night. Hedonism has no meaning. It, too, is a lie, at best the coward's smug compromise." ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... and the library beyond. A new portrait of Natalie was there, hanging on the wall under a shaded light, and she wandered in, still with her cigaret, and surveyed it. Natalie had everything. The portrait showed it. It was beautiful, smug, complacent. ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... also a smug little man with a fresh, well-fed face, bordered by a touch of old-fashioned, gray side-whisker, rather outstanding blue eyes, and he carried, and sometimes used as it was intended to be used, a heavy gold ...
— Pearl of Pearl Island • John Oxenham
... stood now, the silk hat cocked a little to one side, one hand under the tail of his broadcloth coat, a pudgy finger of the other pointing to some new feature of the mechanism of the new carts, and he looked the personification of self-satisfaction and smug content. ...
— The Borough Treasurer • Joseph Smith Fletcher
... acts of others are perhaps, in the queer webwork of human relations, due to some calousness of our own. Who knows? Some man may have robbed a bank in Nashville or fired a gun in Louvain because we looked so intolerably smug ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... period on his note-book and drew his pencil away with a precise movement. He looked at the Masked Lady with a smug smile. "That word snitch," he said. "It's entirely out of place, you know—after you've once introduced Aladdin and Hansel and Grettel in your story. And a giant. It's slang, and it came into use long after the race of giants ...
— Everychild - A Story Which The Old May Interpret to the Young and Which the Young May Interpret to the Old • Louis Dodge
... no capacity for life. I could be considered foolish— Today I am not going to the restaurant. I am after all this time weary of the waiters, Who scornfully bring us, with their smug grimaces, Dark beer and make us so confused That we cannot find our home And we must Use the foolish street lights To prop ourselves up with weak hands. Today I have bigger things in mind— Ah, I shall find out the meaning of existence. And in the evening I shall do some roller skating ...
— The Verse of Alfred Lichtenstein • Alfred Lichtenstein
... birthright.... Oh, memory was there to crucify me, by day and by night. And yet.... Why, it was a thing that is done every day by men these people say their prayers to.... Oh, yes—I wanted to punish—him for his smug condescension, his patronizing playing of the good Samaritan. And through him all these others ... show them that their old idol wore claws on those feet of clay. But not in that way. No, a much cleverer way than that. Perhaps there would be no money when they ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... as smug a hypocrite as ever scuttled a ship, had intended to run the Durande on the Hanways. His belt contained three thousand pounds. He meant to lose the ship on the Hanways, a mile from shore, and when the ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... this 'ARRISON he sets his back up. Dry smug as can't 'andle a gun, I'll bet Marlboro' 'Ouse to a broomstick, and ain't got no notion of Fun. "Loves the Moors much too well for to carry one;" that's wot he says, sour old sap Bet my boots as he can't 'it a 'aystack at twenty yards rise—eh, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 30, 1890. • Various
... will use the world, and sift it, To a thousand humors shift it, As you spin a cherry. O doleful ghosts, and goblins merry! O all you virtues, methods, mights, Means, appliances, delights, Reputed wrongs and braggart rights, Smug routine, and things allowed, Minorities, things under cloud! Hither! take me, use me, fill me, Vein and ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... who had all but reached the smug bathos of a mutual admiration society turned astonished ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Various
... side by side, and converse in the same language, if they are so absolutely dominated by their own form of religious thought, as to be as helpless as idiots in the presence of any other, can we expect that the ordinary British traveller, "brandishing his Bible and his bath," strong in the smug conviction of his mental, moral, and religious preeminence, will be a very sympathetic, conscientious, and reliable interpreter of the religion of the Zulu or ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... beginning of the War, he cannot resist a certain impatience. In the first place, there is a family likeness which makes it impossible to distinguish one writer from another, and there is a tendency to a smug approval of British prejudice, and to a horrible confidence in England's power of "muddling through," which look rather ghastly in the ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... not make him less interesting as a figure in that amusing literarified society; and we may be glad to see him in Parma with Signor Torelli's eyes, as he "issues smug, ornate, with his well-fitting, polished shoe, his handsome leg in its neat stocking, his whole immaculate person, and his demure visage, and, gently sauntering from Casa Caprara, takes his way ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... and Double Dealer, Congreve might pass for as pure a writer as Cowper himself, who, in poems revised by so austere a censor as John Newton, calls a fox-hunting squire Nimrod, and gives to a chaplain the disrespectful name of Smug. Congreve might with good effect have appealed to the public whether it might not be fairly presumed that, when such frivolous charges were made, there were no very serious charges to make. Instead of ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Au-dessus de la bataille...." The good Cardinal would have made a good lawyer. He had as little to say about God and the general righteousness of things as the Bishop of London. But he got in some smug reminders of the severance of diplomatic relations with the Vatican. Perhaps now France will be wiser. He pointed out that the Holy See in its Consistorial Allocution of January 22nd, 1915, invited the belligerents to observe the rules of war. Could anything more be done than that? Oh!—in ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... little party of a dozen, not including Herr Kupferkram and the Frau, who will insist upon waiting on us. There is the smug master-butcher from round the corner, who has a very becoming sense of his own position in society; two mild-spoken bookseller's clerks, who scarcely find their voices till the evening is far advanced; my friend and ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie
... flight of women and children from town after town is too awful to witness. Shame on the British Government to make our Colony the scene of this bloody struggle, and leave the handful of soldiers sent out all unsupported, unprepared—unprepared as usual—all smug and self-confident in the little overcrowded, over-comfortable island, and forgetful of the horrors to which unfortunate colonists are exposed ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 2 (of 6) - From the Commencement of the War to the Battle of Colenso, - 15th Dec. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... He spread out his hands in a gesture of hopelessness. "I knew you wouldn't believe it when I started. You couldn't. It would be a kind of blasphemy against the sacred institution of pavements. You're too damn smug, Ridgeway. I can't shake you. You haven't sat two days and two nights, keeping your eyes open by sheer teeth-gritting, until they got used to it and wouldn't shut any more. When I tell you I found that yellow thing snooping around the davits, and three ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... slinging my 'ook For old Turmutshire, going out nuttin', or bobbing for fish in a brook! Not der wriggle, dear boy, I assure you. Could stars of Mayfair be content To round upon Rome or the Riggi, and smug up ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 16, 1890 • Various
... a bitter mood. The little matter of the delayed letter had brought out that alien streak in him again, and once more he saw the Griersons as he had seen them in the early days of his return, unsympathetic, prejudiced, almost smug. He had been striving hard to win their approval. He had given up Lalage; he had written only things of which they could approve; he had become engaged to a girl essentially of ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... little while in an altogether different world—the world not of things and ambitions and cares, but of ecstasy. Such performances and such an attitude on the part of the listener are all too rare in these days of smug intellectualism and hypersophistication, and we venture to assert that this is at least partly due to the fact that many present-day conductors are intellectual rather than ...
— Essentials in Conducting • Karl Wilson Gehrkens
... pompously and then paused, glancing rather uncertainly from the detective to Morrow. It needed no keen observer to note the change in the man since the scene of that morning, at Miss Lawton's. He had become a mere shell of his former self. The smug unctuousness was gone; the jaunty side-whiskers drooped; his chalk-like skin fell in flabby folds, and his crafty eyes shifted ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander
... with the words "Not while you got a razor to cut yer throat".... Ah, well, common sense would reach even the Army some day, and the soldier be treated and disciplined as a man and a citizen—and perhaps, when it did, and the soldier gave a better description of his life, the other citizen, the smug knave who despises him while he shelters behind him, will become less averse from having his own round shoulders straightened, his back flattened and his muscles developed as he takes his part in the first fundamental elementary duty of a citizen—preparation for the defence of ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... lock. On the way, thinking about Sattell, he suddenly recovered a completely new memory. On their first wedding anniversary, so long ago, he and his wife had gone out to dinner to celebrate. He remembered how she looked: the almost-smug joy they shared that they would be together for always, with one ...
— Scrimshaw • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... Hawaiian native teacher, Lilo, always haunted Mac-pherson's house, and every trader and trading skipper detested this teacher above all others. Macpherson liked him and said he was "earnest," the other white men called him and believed him to be, a smug-faced and ...
— Rodman The Boatsteerer And Other Stories - 1898 • Louis Becke
... the Phoenix. "I have no doubt our friend is stretching the truth shamelessly. You need not look so smug, Monster. You were not the only one in the war. I have gone through anti-aircraft fire a number of times. Some of it was very severe. In ...
— David and the Phoenix • Edward Ormondroyd
... one, in scented sheets a-loll! Rich fare and rosy wine have lapped his soul In a bon-vivant's slumbers. His pen lies there, the ink is scarcely dry With which he sketched the smug philosophy Of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari Volume 98, January 4, 1890 • Various
... when he was nearly forty years old, he made his first literary hit with Sartor Resartus which called out a storm of caustic criticism. The Germanic style, the elephantine humor, the strange conceits and the sledge-hammer blows at all which the smug English public regarded with reverence—all these features aroused irritation. Four years later came The French Revolution, which established Carlyle's fame as one of the greatest of English writers. From this time on he was freed from the fear of poverty, but it was only ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... and I cried. Why—why, damn it, sir, this boy Matt's people and mine are all buried in the same cemetery back home. Yes, sir! And nearly all of 'em have the same epitaph—'Lost at Sea'—and—you idiot, Skinner! What do you mean, sir, by standing there with your infernal little smile on your smug face? Out of my office, you jackanapes, and call the dogs off this boy Matt. Why, there was never one of his breed that wasn't a man and a seaman, ...
— Cappy Ricks • Peter B. Kyne
... not a calling man. And I 've come down here for rest and recreation. I 'll pay no calls. Let that be understood. Calls, quotha! And in the country, at that. Oh, don't I know them? Oh, consecrated British dulness! The smug faces, the vacuous grins; the lifeless, limping attempts at conversation; the stares of suspicious incomprehension if you chance to say a thing that has a point; and then, the thick, sensible, slightly muddy boots. I ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... Midlands are, one would suppose, as hideous as human half-wittedness could invent or endure. But they are different. They are complete; they are, in their way, compact; rounded and finished with an effect that may be prim or smug, but is not raw. The surroundings of them are neat, if it be in a niggling fashion. But American ugliness is not complete even as ugliness. It is broken off short; it is ragged at the edges; even ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... good God's earth are the chaplains. There was Major the Reverend John Pringle, of Yukon fame, whose only son Jack was killed in action after he had walked two hundred miles to enlist. No cant, no smug psalm-singing, mourners'-bench stuff for him. He believed in his Christianity like a man; he was ready to fight for his belief like a man; he cared for us like a father, and stood beside us in the mornings as we drank our stimulant. Again, ...
— Private Peat • Harold R. Peat
... refused "Sister Carrie" with a spirit bordering upon indignation in 1900, took over the rights of publication from B. W. Dodge & Co., in 1912, and reissued the book in a new (and extremely hideous) format, with a publisher's note containing smug quotations from the encomiums of the Fortnightly Review, the Athenaeum, the Spectator, the Academy and other London critical journals. More, they contrived humorously to push the date of their copyright back to 1900. But this new enthusiasm ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... hall, hotel, or hut? If in an inn, nobody interferes with you in meddling officiousness; neither landlord, bagman, waiter, chambermaid, boots;—you are left to yourself without being neglected. Your bell may not be emulously answered by all the menials on the establishment, but a smug or shock-headed drawer appears in good time; and if mine host may not always dignify your dinner by the deposition of the first dish, yet, influenced by the rumour that soon spreads through the premises, he bows farewell at your departure, with a shrewd ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... he did appear Like a slop-merchant from Wapping, And with smug face, and eye severe, On every side did perk and peer Till he saw ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... same down at home; there was our big old apple tree, the Gennet-Moyle, as I could get up when I liked, or knock as many down as I pleased with mother's clothes props—good apples they was, too; but they wouldn't do—one always wanted to get over Thompson's walls to smug those old hard baking pears, which was like nibbling the knobs off ...
— Witness to the Deed • George Manville Fenn
... secure in its social and political alliances; and he was bent on shaming people into severer notions. "We will have a vocabularium apostolicum, and I will start it with four words: 'pampered aristocrats,' 'resident gentlemen,' 'smug parsons,' and 'pauperes Christi'. I shall use the first on all occasions; it seems to me just to hit the thing." "I think of putting the view forward (about new monasteries), under the title of a 'Project ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... children. Yet, all the time, he had a feeling that, since he alone knew all the circumstances of his case, he alone was entitled to blame or to excuse himself. The glib judgments that moralists would pass upon his conduct could be nothing but the imbecilities of smug and pharisaic fools—of those not under this drugging spell—of such as had not blood enough, perhaps, ever to fall ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... that paints the sky, And every splendid noontide high, All know the Glugs so well, so well. 'Tis an easy matter, and plain to tell. For, lacking wit, with a candour smug, A Glug will boast that he is a Glug. And they climb the trees, if it shines or rains, To settle the squirming in their brains, And the darting pains That are caused by rushing and ...
— The Glugs of Gosh • C. J. Dennis
... air, And seats him in his wooden chair: 30 Mouth, nose, and cheek the lather hides: Light, smooth, and swift the razor glides. 'I hope your custom, sir,' says pug. 'Sure never face was half so smug.' The goat, impatient for applause, Swift to the neighbouring hill withdraws: The shaggy people grinned and stared. 'Heyday! what's here? without a beard! Say, brother, whence the dire disgrace? What envious hand hath ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... no comfort, and when he came among his fellows their constraint and silence were far from reassuring. Nor, when the sitting had begun, did he like the enigmatic smile with which the well-dressed Paige stood and swung his watch-chain. How he distrusted and feared this smug, self-complacent young man! Yet the state's attorney's first words ...
— The Calico Cat • Charles Miner Thompson
... and Death of the merry Devill of Edmonton, with the pleasant Prancks of Smug the smith, Sir John, and mine Host of the George, about the stealing of Venison, ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... estimate of his pupil, it was a good while before he got the point of view, so little had he been prepared for it by the smug young barbarians to whom the tradition of tutorship, as hitherto revealed to him, had been adjusted. Morgan was scrappy and surprising, deficient in many properties supposed common to the genus and ...
— The Pupil • Henry James
... cannot get it discounted. Leave the rest to me, and I think the bill you have indorsed to Sparkle will be paid." Comforted by this assurance, Axminster, fearfully changed from the nervous, but smug, hopeful man of the morning, departed. It now remained for me to exert what skill I possessed, to bring about the desired result. I lost no time in writing a letter to the Honorable Miss Snape, of which ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... room and down the broad marble stairs to the hotel foyer as though fearing something was behind them to seize and hold them prisoner. The smug, well-dressed men and women who were lounging there staring listlessly at the rain, glanced up with a quicker interest in life at sight of their flushed cheeks and eager eyes. They caught in them the living ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... a garland of red roses Had fallen about the hood of some smug nun When irresponsibly dropped as from the sun, In fulth of numbers freaked with musical closes, Upon Victoria's formal middle time His leaves ...
— Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries, with - Miscellaneous Pieces • Thomas Hardy
... there is just one subject, of late years, which has brought together the Socialists and the Labour men, the Syndicalists and the Communists, the Nationalists and the Internationalists. All those who work for freedom are learning breadth. If they ever find a leader, I think that this dear, smug country of yours may have to face the greatest surprise ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... now, staring at the smug young medical politicians and the tired old general practitioners filing in and out. One of the latter halted, fumbled in his pocket ...
— Badge of Infamy • Lester del Rey
... left their tracks, mingled with those of the wild turkeys and of countless water fowl. It was a far-off, unknown, unvalued land. Our flag, long past the Sabine, had halted at the Nueces. Now it was to advance across this wild region to the Rio Grande. Thus did smug James ...
— 54-40 or Fight • Emerson Hough
... little foolish—leaping thus into the village spotlight, sallying forth into the wide world—and a little gay and thrilled. The morning was coming steadily up the sky; the daily miracle was going on. And she was going on—on! Old Sally's scoldings didn't matter, nor Marty's smug confidence. She shivered a little but kept her eyes on the growing ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... browses on the very confines of the scanty, small settlement of cheap gentility where you and your neighbors—people of moderate means like yourself—huddle together in your endless, unceasing struggle for a home and self-respect. You know that your smug, mean little house, tricked out with machine-made scroll-work, and insufficiently clad in two coats of ready-mixed paint, is an eyesore to the poor old gentleman who has sold you a corner of his father's estate to build ...
— Jersey Street and Jersey Lane - Urban and Suburban Sketches • H. C. Bunner
... pathos in the words which the author may not have himself fully understood; whereas the similar expression of Tasso's Silvia quoted on a previous page is insufferable in its smug self-conceit. ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... exclaimed this personage. 'Yes, your damned smug, settled, sensible sort made the French Revolution. Oh! I know some say it was no good, and you're just back where you were before. Why, blast it all, that's just where we all want to be—back where we were before! That is revolution—going right round! Every ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... salary he purposed paying Evan would ruin them both. Evan was left standing in the middle of the room. Before he had time to take a further survey of his surroundings the door from the hall was softly opened, and a smug, pale young man in a sober suit sidled into the room, a servant. Evan learned later that "Second man" was his official title. "Spy" was writ large on him. The house seemed to be swarming with them. This fellow had undoubtedly been listening ...
— The Deaves Affair • Hulbert Footner
... was best in their author, of his frank, ebullient, sensuous nature, lighted up here at least by a genuine if scarcely delicate humor. Of direct suggestion of vice Balzac was, naturally, as incapable as he was of smug puritanism; but it must be confessed that as a raconteur his proper audience, now that the monastic orders have passed away, would be ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... gentle blood that was in her: she had cast her lot with her mother. He forgot his own aspirations and hopes for her in this bitter hour. He wanted to hurt her, so that she might cry out with him in ugly rage against the smug, serene paragon. If he only could bring Mary to his level, so that Christine might no longer be so arrogantly proud of the blood that ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... Othello seems more poignantly emotional in the presence of the coldly intellectual Iago. In "The School for Scandal," Charles and Joseph Surface are much more effective together than either of them would be alone. The wholehearted and happy-go-lucky recklessness of the one sets off the smooth and smug dissimulation of the other; the first gives light to the play, and the second shade. Hamlet's wit is sharpened by the garrulous obtuseness of Polonius; the sad world-wisdom of Paula Tanqueray is accentuated by the innocence of Ellean. Similarly, ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... imagine, for an instant, I would stoop to seek your protection? I would die first! You have had things your own way too long, Mr. Brute MacNair! You think yourself secure, in your smug egotism. But the end is in sight. Your petty despotism is doomed. You have hoodwinked the authorities, bribed the police, connived with the Hudson Bay Company, bullied and browbeaten the Indians, cheated them out of their birthright of land and liberty, and have forced them ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... Ninety-five and Eighteen Hundred Ninety-six, when over eleven hundred "brownie" and "chipmunk" magazines were started in America. Every man with two or three ideas and ten dollars' capital started a magazine. Steele, teeming with thoughts demanding expression, at war with smug society, and possessing wit withal, started the "Tatler," to be issued three times a week, price one penny. Seizing upon a creation of Swift's, "Isaac Bickerstaff," a character already known to ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... of events turns our sternest resolves to ridicule. On the next street-corner was a hair-dresser's shop, its genial little proprietor, plump and smug, rubbing his hands and smiling in the doorway. Beholding the commanding figure of the yellow-bearded young aristocrat, afar off, his professional mouth watered over him. What a harvest for shears and razor was ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... are usually exceedingly busy in calculating the chances of a huge fight—indeed they spend a good part of each year in that pleasing employment. Smug diplomatists talk glibly about "war clearing the air;" and the crowd—the rank and file—chatter as though war were a pageant quite divorced from wounds and death, or a mere harmless hurly-burly where ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... wings was used for the kitchen offices, there being large fireplaces in both of them, very suitable for the getting up of good dinners.[3] The grounds about the house have been much altered of late years—the gardens long since destroyed. A smug, close-shaven turf replaces the old-fashioned flower-beds and shrubbery, amid which I love to fancy sweet Peggy Arnold trailing her French brocades and flowered chintzes, her rosy ear attuned to ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... time of Will's entering college, and had expected nothing less than an exposure of his oft broken promises and the long delayed payment of his debt; but as the old man proceeded without allusion to his shortcomings, he had regained his courage, and his usual smug appearance of righteous peace ...
— Garthowen - A Story of a Welsh Homestead • Allen Raine
... through five editions within a year of its appearance, which was a conspicuous success in the days of an audience so limited when compared with the vast reading public of later times. The smug little bookseller must have been greatly pleased by the good fortune attending his first venture into a new field, especially since he essayed it so late in life and almost by accident. His motive had been in ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... conventional view of life. By setting art so high, it sets industrial civilisation very low. Here, then, it may shake hands with the broader and vaguer spirit of the age; the effort to produce serious art may bear witness to a stir in the underworld, to a weariness of smug materialism and a more passionate and spiritual conception of life. The art of the movement, in so far as it is art, expresses nothing temporal or local; but it may be a manifestation of something that is happening here and now, something of which the majority ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... had a feeling that, since he alone knew all the circumstances of his case, he alone was entitled to blame or to excuse himself. The glib judgments that moralists would pass upon his conduct could be nothing but the imbecilities of smug and pharisaic fools—of those not under this drugging spell—of such as had not blood enough, perhaps, ever ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... brain, only waiting to know the fate of this one. And it had come back! It was the best he had to offer, and his best was not good enough! He looked at the shabby, dog-eared sheet, and the folded enclosure that doubtless set forth the editor's smug regrets, then with an impatient gesture he flung the envelope and its contents into the scrap-basket, cursing himself and his conceit in thinking he could write, and editors and their conceit in ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... had all but reached the smug bathos of a mutual admiration society turned astonished ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Various
... and out came Simon—the man who'd got me convicted, and my own brother too, mind you!—looking as smug as the hard-hearted old humbug he was. He got the shock of his life when he saw who it was, but I began gently and I put a proposition to him. I'll bet none of you ...
— Simon • J. Storer Clouston
... little room with angry eyes. If only Fate had set her feet in sunnier paths. She looked at the plain furniture and cheap carpet; the wallpaper was hideous; there was a frightful oleograph of two Early Victorian women with crinolines and ringlet curls hanging over the mantlepiece. They both looked smug and self-satisfied. There was an enlarged photograph of a bald-headed man wearing a Masonic apron on another wall. He was fat and had his right hand plastered carefully along a chair-back to bring into prominence a large signet ring. Esther ...
— The Phantom Lover • Ruby M. Ayres
... called the king, it became more impossible for him to bear any other name all his days. Therefore Sapt let Mr. Rassendyll doubt and struggle, while he himself wrote his story and laid his long-headed plans. And now and then James, the little servant, came in and went out, sedate and smug, but with a quiet satisfaction gleaming in his eyes. He had made a story for a pastime, and it was being translated into history. He at least would bear ...
— Rupert of Hentzau - From The Memoirs of Fritz Von Tarlenheim: The Sequel to - The Prisoner of Zenda • Anthony Hope
... the world a better place for us all. But somehow this doesn't apply to the mass, and particularly not to the circles we invaded in Granville. With here and there a solitary exception that class is hopeless in its smug self-satisfaction—its narrowness of outlook, and unblushing exploitation of ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... and was then rewarded by the sight of the respectable-looking butler. His face appeared—or I imagined it,—even more smug than before in its expression, and there was something suggestive of injured dignity ...
— The House by the Lock • C. N. Williamson
... made a period on his note-book and drew his pencil away with a precise movement. He looked at the Masked Lady with a smug smile. "That word snitch," he said. "It's entirely out of place, you know—after you've once introduced Aladdin and Hansel and Grettel in your story. And a giant. It's slang, and it came into use long after the ...
— Everychild - A Story Which The Old May Interpret to the Young and Which the Young May Interpret to the Old • Louis Dodge
... Milly suffered these dreadful words, these horrible caresses. Then exerting the strength of frenzy, she pushed him from her and bounded to the other side of the room, entrenching herself behind the big rosewood table with its smug mats and ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... upon a less prepossessing man. To liken him to a vicious over-fed pug is more than charitable. Smug, purse-proud and evil, his bloated countenance was most suggestive. There was no pity about the coarse mouth, which he had twisted into a smile, two deep sneer lines cut into the unwholesome pallor of his cheeks, from under drooping lids two beady eyes shifted their keen appraising glance ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates
... faw, fum! bubble and squeak! Blessedest Thursday's the fat of the week. Rumble and tumble, sleek and rough, Stinking and savory, smug and gruff, Take the church-road, for the bell's due chime Gives us ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... not know what to-morrow might bring. Occasionally a visitor came over through curiosity to see the theatre of the accident, shrug his shoulders, wonder at the folly of young men, and depart with an air of smug self-satisfaction. There were a few letters from the factory at Loughboro', complaining and then threatening, and at last came a bill for L96.0.0, due on the twelve machines, and an additional bill for L30.0.0, due on material. ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... Barraclough would have taken him for a pleasant, likeable fellow, who might have helped to pass the tedium of a long journey. But his actual feelings were far removed from any such consideration. The smug affability of the man coupled with his obvious strength aroused such indignation in Barraclough that he was scarcely able to remain seated. The difference in their weight and stature precluded ...
— Men of Affairs • Roland Pertwee
... perhaps, as no thought ever occurs at all, there was a physical impossibility that the same thought should recur, It is long since I saw and read these inscriptions; but I remember the impression was of a smug usher at his desk in the intervals of instruction, levelling his pen. Of death, as it consists of dust and worms, and mourners and uncertainty, he had never thought; but the word "death" he had often seen separate and conjunct with other ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... something so deeply shocking in the idea of a woman being other than kind and good, something so antagonistic to the smug conception of Eve as the "minist'ring angel, thou,'' that leaps to extremes in expression ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure
... place. Once More in smothered giggle and unprotesting acquiescence she sensed the resumption of eternal discipline. Already in just this trice of time she felt her rampant young mouth resettle tamely into lines of smug, determinate serenity. Already across her idle lap she felt her clasped fingers begin to frost and tingle again like a cheerfully non-concerned bunch of live wires waiting the one authoritative ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... the same cemetery back home. Yes, sir! And nearly all of 'em have the same epitaph—'Lost at Sea'—and—you idiot, Skinner! What do you mean, sir, by standing there with your infernal little smile on your smug face? Out of my office, you jackanapes, and call the dogs off this boy Matt. Why, there was never one of his breed that wasn't a man and a seaman, ...
— Cappy Ricks • Peter B. Kyne
... talking with pleasure with my wife, and so up and to the Office with Tom, who looks mighty smug upon his marriage, as Jane also do, both of whom I did give joy, and so Tom and I at work at the Office all the morning, till dinner, and then dined, W. Batelier with us; and so after dinner to work again, and sent for Gibson, and kept him also till eight at night, doing much business. ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... was nearly forty years old, he made his first literary hit with Sartor Resartus which called out a storm of caustic criticism. The Germanic style, the elephantine humor, the strange conceits and the sledge-hammer blows at all which the smug English public regarded with reverence—all these features aroused irritation. Four years later came The French Revolution, which established Carlyle's fame as one of the greatest of English writers. From this time on he was freed from the fear of poverty, but it was only in his last ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... the fourth stop from Paris. My family scampered out and away and we followed leisurely after. Fontainebleau is quite smug. There is a fashionable hotel near the station, before which a fine tall fellow in uniform parades. He looked at our basket with contempt, and we looked at him in pity. Just beyond the hotel are smart shops with windows filled with many-colored trifles to tempt the tourist. The ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... Complacent Chancellor? COMINIUS! Unseasoned youth, or untried middle-age, A shouting boy, or a sleek-spoken elder, Hot stripling, cool supplanter! I serve not "Under COMINIUS," nay!—yet since he stands There, where I made firm footing amidst chaos, Stands in smug comfort where we Titans struggled— MOLTKE, and I, and the great Emperor,— Struggled for vantage, which he owes to us;— Since he stands there, and I in shadow sit, Silenced and chidden, I half ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, VOL. 100. Feb. 28, 1891 • Various
... sawmills far away. But this was long before you took your malaria of mosquitoes, and we minded them no more than little children mind them to-day. Indeed, I can keep peacefully still even now to watch a mosquito batten and fatten upon my hand, to see his ravenous, pale abdomen swell to a vast smug redness—that physiological, or psychological, moment for which you wait ere ...
— The Spread Eagle and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... I walked rapidly to the window which looked out on the garden. It was a small and somewhat smug suburban garden; the flower beds a little too neat and like the pattern of a coloured carpet; but on this shining and opulent summer day even they had the exuberance of something natural, I had almost said tropical. In the middle of a bright and verdant but painfully circular ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton
... practically eliminated as a UFO source, the idea of interplanetary spaceships was becoming more popular. During 1948 the people in ATIC were openly discussing the possibility of interplanetary visitors without others tapping their heads and looking smug. During 1948 the novelty of UFO's had worn off for the press and every John and Jane Doe who saw one didn't make the front pages as in 1947. Editors were becoming hardened, only a few of the best reports got any space. ...
— The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects • Edward Ruppelt
... gentleman would feel the change more sharply than I. This was, in all probability, the only hat he had. I turned it over and scrutinized it. It was a genteel old beaver, with an air of respectability that was quite convincing. There was nothing smug about it, either. It suggested amiability in the man who had recently possessed it. It suggested also a mild contempt for public opinion, which is always a sign of superior mentality and advanced years. I began to draw a mental portrait of the old ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VIII (of X) • Various
... penetrated because of the charge for admission. The music and the long vista of the fretted roof filled him with a vague and mystical happiness that he had no words, even mispronounceable words, to express. But some of the smug monuments in the aisles got a wreath of epithets: "Metrorious urnfuls," "funererial claims," "dejected angelosity," for example. He wandered about the precincts and speculated about the people who lived in the ripe and cosy ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... Daily its bells toll. Its melancholy pageantry traverses the streets of wealthy quarters, and it stalks abroad hourly in the slums, and few there are who gaze after it. But here it comes so seldom that its dread features are not made smug by familiarity. When Hite was told to look again at the face and see if memory might not have played him false, to make sure he had never seen the man before yesterday, he hesitated, and advanced with such reluctance, and started back, dropping the cloth, with such swift repulsion, that the ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... to picture him as a noble, disinterested character, ready to sacrifice himself for the public weal. Into his pictures of this man, attired in the long black coat of conventional respectability, with the smug face of pharisaism, he could get nothing but cant and hypocrisy; but in his caricatures of Clayton there was that which pained him worse—disloyalty, untruth, and now and then, to the discerning few who knew the tragedy of Kittrell's soul, there was pity. And ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... department of her social organisation, it required both courage and discernment to raise the warning voice and to apply the wet blanket. But Nietzsche did both, and with spirit, because his worst fears were aroused. Smug content (erbrmliches Behagen) was threatening to thwart his one purpose—the elevation of man; smug content personified in the German scholar was giving itself airs of omniscience, omnipotence, and ubiquity, and all the while it was a mere cover for ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... the platform. The United States Senator, smug and now satisfied that he had chosen aright for his personal interests, sat in the chairman's central seat, and studied his people from under eyelids half lowered while the ...
— The Ramrodders - A Novel • Holman Day
... examining and admiring their room, Cap'n Bill went to the Peony Room to see what it was like and found his quarters were very cozy and interesting. There were pictures on the wall, portraits of grave-looking porpoises, bashful seals, and smug and smiling walruses. Some of the wall panels were formed of mirrors and reflected clearly the interior of the room. Around the ceiling was a frieze of imitation peonies in silver, and the furniture was peony-shaped, the broad leaves being bent to form seats and couches. ...
— The Sea Fairies • L. Frank Baum
... longing for an escape from the empty life she was leading, had been seeking one for years without knowing it. Her existence was losing its savor, and she was still so young and eager and keen to live. Surely this round of social frivolities, the chatter of these silly women and smug tailor-made men, could not be all there was to life. She must have been made for ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... but which never was exacted. And then he summarily dismissed the Sirdars, three only, the Mustaphi, Yahuja Khan the Ameer's father-in-law, and Zakariah Khan his brother, being desired to remain. Their smug complacency was suddenly changed into dismay when they were abruptly told that they ...
— The Afghan Wars 1839-42 and 1878-80 • Archibald Forbes
... meet him on his return. It was a rash vow, I am ready to admit. Yet rash as it was, I do not find it in my heart to be severely critical of him. I rather join with Dr. Peck in my admiration. You know what is the matter with a great many of us smug church members? We are so prudent. We have such admirable possession of all our faculties. We are in danger of dying of self-control. This man in the white heat of his enthusiasm made a solemn pledge to the ...
— Sermons on Biblical Characters • Clovis G. Chappell
... attended at my church alone must have been something enormous. It was a carnal, self-seeking congregation, wholly inattentive to the service which was going on, and devoted to the one object of having my blood. The fleas of all nations were there. The smug, steady, importunate flea from Holywell Street; the pert, jumping puce from hungry France, the wary, watchful pulce with his poisoned stiletto; the vengeful pulga of Castile with his ugly knife; the German floh ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... the matter. His peppery impatience was increasing. This time he was not departing with his customary bland hopefulness. She knew the sort of selfishness her father possessed and how he avoided scenes that troubled his smug serenity. But on this occasion he seemed to be impelled by some urgent reason outside of mere anxiety to be away ...
— When Egypt Went Broke • Holman Day
... and confronted the trembling figure upon the divan. My brother's nickname was given to him at school in virtue of his great size and strength. Standing now above Jasperson, his proportions seemed even larger than usual. The little dandy in his smug black garments with his diamond stud gleaming in the ivy-bosomed shirt (his rings had been given to Miss Birdie), with his features wilting like the wild pansies in the lapel of his coat, dwindled to an amorphous streak beneath the keen ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... all cities upon the farms and mines is to-day exemplified in Europe with such appalling tragedy, that even the smug isolation of the American farmer and the American business man is broken down, not only by human sympathy but by the necessity of a better adjustment of their own economic system to the world crisis from which they are unable ...
— The Farmer and His Community • Dwight Sanderson
... the sky, And every splendid noontide high, All know the Glugs so well, so well. 'Tis an easy matter, and plain to tell. For, lacking wit, with a candour smug, A Glug will boast that he is a Glug. And they climb the trees, if it shines or rains, To settle the squirming in their brains, And the darting pains That are caused by rushing and ...
— The Glugs of Gosh • C. J. Dennis
... succeed in imbuing her husband with her Christian spirit. But when the judge's wife returned home and saw the keen mental distress of the man who had been her companion for twenty-five long years, the comforter in her sorrows, the joy and pride of her young wifehood, she forgot all about her smug churchly consoler, and her heart went out to her husband in a spontaneous burst of genuine human sympathy. Yes, they must do something at once. Where men had failed perhaps a woman could do something. She wanted to cable at once for ...
— The Lion and The Mouse - A Story Of American Life • Charles Klein
... reasonable thing, yet did not rob it of a sense of high adventure; cleansed it of the taints of thrift and selfish concern. In this reaffirmation of vitalism there might be a future, yes, an individual future, yet it was far from the smug conception of salvation. Here was a faith conferred by the freedom of truth; a faith that lost and regained itself in life; it was dynamic in its operation; for, as Lessing said, the searching after truth, and not ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... him? Fenwick asked himself. Did he believe what he had seen or didn't he? He had been smug in front of Baker after the first demonstration, but now he wondered how much he had been covered by the same brush that ...
— The Great Gray Plague • Raymond F. Jones
... the heavy and silver-headed cane of Mr. Brown resound upon the door, over which was a curious carving of a lion dormant, and a date, of which only the two numbers 15 were discernable. Roused by a note so unusual, and an apparition so unwontedly smug as the worthy Morris, a whole legion of dingy and smoke-dried brats, came trooping from the surrounding huts, and with many an elvish cry, and strange oath, and cabalistic word, which thrilled the respectable marrow of Mr. Brown, they ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... was a half-grown leopard cub, vividly marked. He was muzzled and held in leash by a chain affixed to a stout collar, and Bones, a picture of smug gratification, held the ...
— The Keepers of the King's Peace • Edgar Wallace
... and the dreariness of the street increased his misery. The row of common shops, full of common things, the blatant public-houses, the Independent chapel, a horrible stucco parody of a Greek temple with a facade of hideous columns that was a nightmare, villas like smug Pharisees, shops again, a church in cheap Gothic, an old garden blasted and riven by the builder, these were the pictures of the way. When he got home again he flung himself on the bed, and lay there stupidly till sheer ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... still the house in the east Seventies held itself above water by means of that meagre two thousand a month! These rare, almost priceless objects upon which he now gazed had weathered the storm, proof against the temptations that beset an owner embarrassed by their richness; they had maintained a smug relationship to harmony in spite of the jangling of discordant instruments, such as writs and attachments and the wails of insufferable creditors who made the usual mistake of thinking that a man's home is his ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... Josef approached his royal master with deferential remonstrance. He touched the elbow of the oblivious King, who instantly turned. Irritated by what he could see of the express disapproval of his conduct in the smug face of the servitor, he inquired harshly ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... followed upon the age of the great religious conflict one of astounding ebb of spiritual interest. Men turned with all energy to the political and economic interests of a wholly modern civilisation. They retained, after a short period of friction, a smug and latitudinarian orthodoxy, which Methodism did little to change. In France not only was the Huguenot Church annihilated, but the Jansenist movement was savagely suppressed. The tyranny of the Bourbon State and the corruption of the Gallican Church which was so ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... censorious reader looks back upon these poems of the beginning of the War, he cannot resist a certain impatience. In the first place, there is a family likeness which makes it impossible to distinguish one writer from another, and there is a tendency to a smug approval of British prejudice, and to a horrible confidence in England's power of "muddling through," which look rather ghastly in the light of ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... Englishmen bear the stamp of the Public Schools upon them and have made England what she is. Smug-faced missionaries grow fat on the spoils they have collected from smug-faced church-and-chapel-goers at home. Labour Members are in the pay of Germany and frequent infamous flats in the West-End. Liberal Cabinet Ministers—sometimes, more shame to them, of decent birth—wince consciously ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, January 28, 1914 • Various
... child, when it was locked by some ill chance in its mother's womb, could be baptized and its soul saved before the mother and child were left to die together. But nothing was done to save their lives. No greater crimes were ever committed in the name of civilization, religious faith, and smug ignorance than the sacrifice of the lives of countless mothers and children in the first fifteen centuries ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... he answered. "I was head of the school and Ward thought a friend of his ought to have seen. He thinks I am a smug because I have to work, and I suppose I think he is a fool because he thinks I am a smug. He is a queer sort, and it is hopeless for me to try to be friends with him, even if I wanted to be, ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... that has been led out of curiosity to witness such a scene has not with astonishment reflected on the difference between a real committer of a murder, and the idea of one which he has been collecting and heightening all his life out of books, dreams, &c.? The fellow, perhaps, is a sleek, smug-looking man, with light hair and eyebrows,—the latter by no means jutting out or like a crag,—and with none of those marks which our fancy ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... confessed. "I do not know why, but London is getting on my nerves. It is so hatefully, stubbornly, obstinately imperturbable. I would find another word, but it eludes me. I think you would call it smug. And it is so noisy. Can we not go somewhere for lunch where it is tranquil, where one can rest and ...
— The Double Traitor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... overbearing to his inferiors in rank, this fledgling soldier—our comrade of a few days since, and presently the subordinate of most of us, through standing still while we went ahead—used to think the perfection and essence of the military system. And then that smug-faced, smooth-tongued, dirty-looking chaplain, with his second-hand shirt collars and slopshop morality—was it whiskey or brandy that his breath smelt oftenest of? He was the first chaplain I had seen, and I ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... regard to what goes on in prisons, here and in other parts of the world. The conspiracy has been attacked sometimes, and more of late than usual, and once in a while we have caught a glimpse of what is occurring behind those smug, well-fitting doors. But they have been mere glimpses, incoherent, obscure, often imaginative, or guesswork based on scanty, incorrect, at any rate secondhand information; never yet conclusive and complete. In England, Charles Dickens and Charles Reade have personally visited ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... in person; Ledantec really, as Hyde immediately saw, in spite of the smug, smooth exterior, the British-cut whiskers, ...
— The Thin Red Line; and Blue Blood • Arthur Griffiths
... Simple Innocence—these steeds do gallop for sufficient reason, namely—they are to gallop bidden being ridden, bestridden and chidden by whip and spur applied by certain trusty men o' my company, which men go habited, decked, dressed, clad, guised and disguised as smug, sleek ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... Twist. He hurried to intercept her. Anyhow she wasn't either about to cry or getting over having done it. He saw that at once with relief. Nor was she, it would seem, in any sort of distress. On the contrary, Anna-Felicitas looked particularly smug. He saw that once too, with surprise,—why smug? wondered Mr. Twist. She had a pleased look of complete satisfaction on her face. She was oblivious, he noticed, as she passed between the tables, of the guests who ...
— Christopher and Columbus • Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim
... then he roused himself from all these gloomy thoughts to observe his companions. The boys at the upper end, near Mr. Blinkhorn, were fairly attentive, and he noticed one small smug-faced boy about half-way up, who, while a class-mate was faltering and blundering over some question, would cry "I know, sir. Let me tell him. Ask me, sir!" in a restless agony of ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... eyes of Dinsmore took in the smug complacency of the handsome young cad. He knew that this particular brand of fool would go its own way, but he wasted ...
— Oh, You Tex! • William Macleod Raine
... know the meaning of the word friendship. He is not competent to judge, for his wealth precludes him giving a proper opinion. Smug-faced philanthropists can preach comfortable doctrines in pleasant rooms with well-spread tables and good clothing; they can talk about human nature being unjustly accused, and of the kindly impulses and good thoughts in everyone's breasts. Pshaw! anyone can ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... thought so!" said Falloden wrathfully. "He is an impossible person. He wears a frilled shirt, scents himself, and recites his own poems when he hasn't been asked. And he curries favour—abominably—with the dons. He is a smug—of the first water. There is a movement going on in college to suppress him. I warn you I may not be able to keep ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... been happening all through history, in thousands of instances, in the new systems of multivalued physics we recognize it. Under the old system, we already had all the major answers, we thought. Now that we've got our smug certainties knocked out of us, we're just fumbling along, trying to get some of the answers we ...
— Sense from Thought Divide • Mark Irvin Clifton
... delighted to find, that in spite of repression and lectures his young charge was growing up a lad of spirit. He still hoped that some day Leslie might return, and he knew how horrified he would be were he to find that his son was becoming a smug and well conducted citizen. No small portion of his time on each of his visits to Glasgow Malcolm spent in training the boy in the ...
— Bonnie Prince Charlie - A Tale of Fontenoy and Culloden • G. A. Henty
... seem women in work and at play; Ye, who do blindly as women may say; Ye, who kill life in the smug cabarets; Ye, all, at the beck of the little tea-tray; Ye, all, of the measure ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... shone with smug self-satisfaction as he spoke, and he repeated softly, "Yes, yes; ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... soft, and his profile was exceedingly handsome. But in the full view Andy saw nothing except a grisly, purple scar that twisted down beneath the right eye of the man. It drew down the lower lid of that eye, and it pulled the mouth of the man a bit awry, so that he seemed to be smiling in a smug, half-apologetic manner. In spite of his youth he was unquestionably the dominant spirit here. Once or twice the others lifted their voices in argument, and a single word from him cut them short. And when ...
— Way of the Lawless • Max Brand
... commercialism, protests against social conditions, against the grinding of the faces of the poor and weak, and the self-pollution of the rich and strong, in their mad lust for place and power. It is to be doubted strongly if the average bourgeois, smug and fat and prosperous, can understand this man Foma Gordyeeff. The rebellion in his blood is something to which their own does not thrill. To them it will be inexplicable that this man, with his health and his millions, could not go on living as his class ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... instantly, as if a mask had fallen from his smug features. He became alert and vigorous. He was no longer patron of the arts, a wide-minded philanthropist, the man who devotes himself to the good of humanity. The blue eyes were cold and cruel, there was a hungry look about ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... that was respectable. He had hated the smug, self-satisfied merchants of Grand Avenue. He had writhed in torture at the sight of every shiny, purring automobile that had ever passed him with its load of well-groomed men and women. A clean, stiff collar was to Billy as a red ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... that science has bestowed in the way of making labor and its surroundings clean and comfortable, healthful and attractive, was to be provided; all that the ignorance and the shortsighted greediness of employers, bent only on immediate profits and keeping their philanthropy for the smug penuriousness and degrading stupidity of charity, deny to their own self-respect and to justice for their brothers in their power. Arthur and he had wrought it all out, had discovered as a crowning vindication that the result would be profitable in dollars, that their sane and shrewd utopianism ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... a page out of a fashion book, and there were pictures on it of horrid little smug-faced boys in sky-blue suits bowling hoops in a way no real little boy ever bowled a hoop in his life, and simpering little girls in lace frocks holding dolls or sun-shades in ...
— Piccaninnies • Isabel Maud Peacocke
... "Business! "That, too, was a corpse of a word floating on the still waters of past usage. "Money, stocks, bonds, market-reports!" They seemed like forgotten enemies rising to stop him. How could Delbridge smile in his smug way, as he chewed his cigar and boasted of a new club of which he was the president? How could Wright put up with his moderate salary and stand all day at that prison window? What could the limp, pale-faced stenographers ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... of the late Lord Castlereagh's speeches! We should here have Parliamentary eloquence under a most fantastic yet captivating phase. Who, for instance, but the artist to PUNCH could paint CASTLEREAGH'S figure of a smug, contented, selfish traitor, the "crocodile with his hand in his breeches' pocket?" Again, does not the reader recollect that extraordinary person who, according to the North Cray Demosthenes, "turned his back upon himself?" There would be a portrait!—one, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 23, 1841 • Various
... hungry and weary travelers, trooping down the companionway, met files of still more uneasy diners emerging from the saloon. The grinding jar of the vessel, the heavy smell of food, and the pound of ragtime combined to produce an effect as of some sordid and demoniac orgy—an effect derided by the smug respectability of the ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... one that has been characteristic of the Anglican Church ever since. It has always been restless in the presence of a divided Christendom; the sin of the broken unity has always haunted it. It never has taken the smug attitude of sectarianism, a placid self-satisfaction with its own perfection. It has felt the constant pull of the Catholic ideal and has been inspired by it to make effort after effort for the union of Christendom. It has never lost the sense that it ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... Version of the Psalms (Ps. vii. 17); as little was 'noddle', which occurs in one of the few poetical passages in Hawes. The same may be said of 'sconce', in this sense at least; of 'nowl' or 'noll', which Wiclif uses; of 'slops' for trousers (Marlowe's Lucan); of 'cocksure' (Rogers), of 'smug', which once meant no more than adorned ("the smug bridegroom", Shakespeare). 'To nap' is now a word without dignity; while yet in Wiclif's Bible it is said, "Lo he schall not nappe, nether slepe that kepeth Israel" (Ps. cxxi. 4). 'To punch', 'to thump', both of which, ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... with his pencil. I had never disliked him so heartily; he was so smug and comfortable. His office breathed the very spirit of prosperity. I wished to finish ...
— The House of a Thousand Candles • Meredith Nicholson
... On qualifying first he had obtained an appointment as travelling physician to an American, a prominent member of the New York smart set, a man of twenty-two, a motorist, a yachtsman, clean shaved as an actor and smug as a butler, one of those men who make the great American nation so small in the eyes of the world—the world that cannot see beyond the servants' hall antics of New York society to the great plains where the Adamses hew the wood and draw the water, build the cities and bridge ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... and hymns preparatory to the First Communion. Intoxication with the music of chants and organ, drowned in the scent of incense and flowers, hung about with scapularies, rosaries, consecrated medals, and holy images, he, like his companions, assumed a certain air of self-importance and wore a smug, sanctified look. He was cold and unbending towards his aunt, who spoke with far too much unconcern about the "great day." Though she had long been in the habit of taking her nephew to Mass every Sunday, she ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... How little they knew what was in store for them! She, Olga Loschek, by the lifting of a finger, could turn their smug superiority into tears and despair, could ruin them and send them flying for shelter to the very ends of ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... being moved from the Earth freighters, and Duke swore again. Five billion Earthmen would read of their "generosity" to Meloa, and any guilt they felt for their desertion would vanish in a smug satisfaction at their charity. Smugness was easy in a world without dust or carrion smell or ...
— Victory • Lester del Rey
... checked herself, aware of something almost ludicrously pitiful in the smug tearful countenance and stumpy would-be fashionable figure. Hit a man your own size, or bigger, by all means if you are game to take the consequences. But to smite a creature conspicuously your inferior in fortune—past, present, and prospective—is ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... He waited at the bottom of the steps with that smug financial face of his—a mask through which, in that moment, the warmth of suffering and love seemed struggling to escape. He was plucking, from his thin crop, gray hairs that he could ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... those who ardently seek the real ones. He knows that in the market of character cash alone is currency; here you cannot draw checks on some other person's deposits. To Him it is better by far to die facing the right than to live in smug content with borrowed merits. This world will never be content with a gospel that offers only vicarious virtues; at its heart it knows too well its need of the genuine usable ones; it has at least the dormant faculties of an appetite ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... unfortunately a potent factor in my case was the terror with which in some way Mr. Parsons still succeeded in inspiring me. I have found myself since those days in positions of some peril, but never have I known such fear as of that old, smug-looking man. This dread had an almost paralysing effect, nor could I fail to forget the terrible penalty I should certainly have to pay if my bid for liberty were not to succeed. So that Mr. Parsons ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... and did live as they taught, and what was there like the New Testament or even the first ages now? Alas! there was nothing completely like them; but of all unlike things, the Church of England with its "smug parsons," and pony-carriages for their wives and daughters, seemed to him the most unlike: more unlike than the great unreformed Roman Church, with its strange, unscriptural doctrines and its undeniable crimes, and its alliance, wherever it could, with the world. But at least ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... who wrote, after all, one of the best histories of the English nation, certainly more readable than Freeman and less prejudiced than Froude, is neither studied nor mentioned in our schools. Even poor Acton, whose smug Whig bias is apparent to the stupidest, who nourished himself on Lutheran learning, "mostly," as he says, pathetically "in octavo volumes," is thought of darkly by the uninstructed as an emissary of the Jesuits. But who can ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... his servant, who had to be fetched from the boma—a smug-faced little rascal, obviously in love with the glory reflected on the sergeant-major's servant. He was made to produce a basin and cold water—he discovered them somewhere in the dim recesses of the store—and sponge his master's ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... was generated from the contradictions between Rodale's self-righteous and sometimes scientifically vague positions and the amused defenses of the smug scientific community. Donald Hopkins' Chemicals, Humus and the Soil is the best, most humane, and emotionally generous defense against the extremism of Rodale. Hopkins makes hash of many organic principles while still upholding the vital role of humus. Anyone ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon
... assisted at a reception, or was going out of town, or coming back. Those who ran their husbands in debt to get into society always looked to see what Mrs. Haldene had been doing the past week. The society reporters, very often smug young women of aristocratic but impoverished families, called her up by telephone every day in the week. Mrs. Haldene pretended to demur, but the reporters found her an inexhaustible mine of tittle-tattle. Sometimes they omitted some news ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... It was because of this that his aunt could not get him to go to church—which was a horror to her orthodox soul. He told her he would like to go to church if it were empty but he could not bear it when it was full—full of smug, ugly people. Most people, he thought, were ugly—though not so ugly as he was—and ugliness made him sick with repulsion. Now and then he saw a pretty girl at whom he liked to look but he never saw one that wholly pleased him. To him, the homely, crippled, poverty-stricken Roger Temple whom they ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... in regard to what goes on in prisons, here and in other parts of the world. The conspiracy has been attacked sometimes, and more of late than usual, and once in a while we have caught a glimpse of what is occurring behind those smug, well-fitting doors. But they have been mere glimpses, incoherent, obscure, often imaginative, or guesswork based on scanty, incorrect, at any rate secondhand information; never yet conclusive and complete. In England, Charles Dickens and Charles Reade have personally visited prisons, ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... comfort ... in a case like Mackworth's, fairly unobjectionable ... but in most cases insufferably stodgy ... the dry-rot of art, literature, life ... leading to a smug conceit that in turn ends in that school of "two hills of corn where one ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... arrangement. Opposite the door was a large and very bad painting of the two sisters as young girls, sitting, with arms encircled, in low dresses, on the seashore before a grey and angry sea, and Uncle Mathew as a small, shiny-faced boy in tight short blue trousers, carrying a bucket and spade, and a smug, pious expression. The room was lit with gas that sizzled and hissed in a protesting undertone; there was a big black cat near the fire, and this watched Maggie with green ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... everyone laughed, but I did not laugh. The tears came into my eyes. I was so happy I wanted to shout. Perhaps you understand what I mean. In the office that day when I read the letter my fiancee had written I had said to myself, 'I will take care of the dear little woman.' There was something smug, you see, about that. In her house when she cried out in that way, and when everyone laughed, what I said to myself was something like this: 'We will take care of ourselves.' I whispered something ...
— Triumph of the Egg and Other Stories • Sherwood Anderson
... of commercialism, protests against social conditions, against the grinding of the faces of the poor and weak, and the self-pollution of the rich and strong, in their mad lust for place and power. It is to be doubted strongly if the average bourgeois, smug and fat and prosperous, can understand this man Foma Gordyeeff. The rebellion in his blood is something to which their own does not thrill. To them it will be inexplicable that this man, with his health and his millions, could not go on living as his ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... Milky Way. The clouds are as soft as a fleecy rug, And as cool as cool can be. The skies fit into my figure snug, And they make me feel so blithe and smug That I am glad Fate made me Me. Oh Me! Ah Me! 'Tis a lovely fate And a mission great To be Like me And to love the skies, And the clouds to prize, And to hate the turbulent sea, He—he— So I lift my voice And I loud rejoice That the Fates ...
— Andiron Tales • John Kendrick Bangs
... long talking with pleasure with my wife, and so up and to the Office with Tom, who looks mighty smug upon his marriage, as Jane also do, both of whom I did give joy, and so Tom and I at work at the Office all the morning, till dinner, and then dined, W. Batelier with us; and so after dinner to work again, and sent ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... carefully. Her wise soul knew that the Emptiness must come first—the awful world-old Emptiness which for an endless-seeming time nothing can fill— And all smug preachers of the claims of life and duty must be chary of approaching those who stand desolate ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... and summon all loyal gentlemen to rally round it, had been a measure agreed in countless meetings, and applauded over thousands of bumpers. I have a pretty good memory, and could mention the name of many a gentleman, now a smug officer of the United States Government, whom I have heard hiccup out a prayer that he might be allowed to perish under the folds of his country's flag; or roar a challenge to the bloody traitors absent with the rebel army. But let bygones be bygones. This, however, is matter ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... like a smug bridegroom. What! I will be jovial: come, come, I am a king, My masters, know ...
— The Tragedy of King Lear • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... proved to be a line of fine houses lying in the vague borderland between Notting Hill and Kensington. The particular one at which my cabman pulled up had an air of smug and demure respectability in its old-fashioned iron railings, its massive folding-door, and its shining brasswork. All was in keeping with a solemn butler who appeared framed in the pink radiance of a tinted electrical ...
— The Adventure of the Dying Detective • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the better brothers, Who think of something else besides the pen; But for the children of the "Mighty Mother's," The would-be wits, and can't-be gentlemen, I leave them to their daily "tea is ready,"[230] Smug coterie, and ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... of curiosity to witness such a scene has not with astonishment reflected on the difference between a real committer of a murder, and the idea of one which he has been collecting and heightening all his life out of books, dreams, &c.? The fellow, perhaps, is a sleek, smug-looking man, with light hair and eyebrows,—the latter by no means jutting out or like a crag,—and with none of those marks which our ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... palpable stones and mortar. This lordly pleasure-house stands four thousand feet above the sea level. On this commanding height, in this savage Alpine loneliness, in the midst of a scenery once wildly beautiful, but now shorn and shaven into a smug likeness of a French garden, Philip passed all the later years of ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... great artist in these days is a prince without a title —he has glory and fortune, the two chief social advantages—next to virtue," he added, in a smug tone. ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... which I sent it! A spirit as wild, as reckless, as ranting, as defiant as ever devil indulged in! The humility of my presentation letter to his Majesty was beautiful! The reply of the flunkey-secretary was equally beautiful in smug courtesy: 'Sir, I am commanded by the King to thank you for the book of poems you have kindly sent for his acceptance!' I say again, Thord, do ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... Isn't so much the things they say, as the way they say them! Do you not recall the smug, confident look, the assurance of having said a particularly happy thing? They come inevitably as the alarm clock; when the hands of circumstance touch the hour, the bromidic remark ...
— Are You A Bromide? • Gelett Burgess
... nothing worse in the Old Bachelor and Double Dealer, Congreve might pass for as pure a writer as Cowper himself, who, in poems revised by so austere a censor as John Newton, calls a fox-hunting squire Nimrod, and gives to a chaplain the disrespectful name of Smug. Congreve might with good effect have appealed to the public whether it might not be fairly presumed that, when such frivolous charges were made, there were no very serious charges to make. Instead of doing ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... little storekeepers, with their smug pretensions to homely honesty, were profiting by some of the vilest, basest forms of fraud, such as robbing the poor by the light-weight and short-weight trick, [Footnote: These forms of cheating exist at present to a greater extent than ever before. ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... without collusion or comparison of results—are practically identical. They are virtually in complete agreement. Now, the strange thing is this: their conclusions are wrong in every instance" (here I nearly laughed aloud, for, as I glanced at the two experts, the expression of smug satisfaction on their countenances changed with lightning rapidity to a ludicrous spasm of consternation); "not sometimes wrong and sometimes right, as would have been the case if they had made mere guesses, but wrong every time. ...
— The Red Thumb Mark • R. Austin Freeman
... Falloden wrathfully. "He is an impossible person. He wears a frilled shirt, scents himself, and recites his own poems when he hasn't been asked. And he curries favour—abominably—with the dons. He is a smug—of the first water. There is a movement going on in college to suppress him. I warn you I may not be able to keep ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Selkirks and fail to glean at least some slight degree of wilderness knowledge. Both Virginia and Lounsbury had been on horseback before. Virginia had ridden in the parks of her native city: long ago and far away a barefoot, ragged boy—much to be preferred to the smug and petulant man who now tried to hard to forget those humble days—had bestrode an old plow horse nightly on the way to a watering trough. But this riding had qualities all its own. There was no open road winding before them. Nor was there any trail,—in ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall
... one would suppose, as hideous as human half-wittedness could invent or endure. But they are different. They are complete; they are, in their way, compact; rounded and finished with an effect that may be prim or smug, but is not raw. The surroundings of them are neat, if it be in a niggling fashion. But American ugliness is not complete even as ugliness. It is broken off short; it is ragged at the edges; even its worthy objects have around them a sort of halo of refuse. Somebody said of the rugged ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... her breath away, perhaps even wounded her, momentarily, but she had recovered herself quickly. Her smile had been full of the smug satisfaction of one who has washed ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... Eighteen Hundred Ninety-five and Eighteen Hundred Ninety-six, when over eleven hundred "brownie" and "chipmunk" magazines were started in America. Every man with two or three ideas and ten dollars' capital started a magazine. Steele, teeming with thoughts demanding expression, at war with smug society, and possessing wit withal, started the "Tatler," to be issued three times a week, price one penny. Seizing upon a creation of Swift's, "Isaac Bickerstaff," a character already known to the public, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... save the State Is Temperance, enforced by Local Option. Spirited Foreign Policy? Anon! Fiscal Economy? Quite secondary! All is no use till the Drink-Demon's gone! BUNG, who so loved him, feels his colour vary; And, while he perorates to all men's wonder. Smug WILFRID smiles and whispers, "That's ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 1, 1890 • Various
... guessed because they were all quite sure what Alligator had done. They went out in a body to look for him. He lay beside the barn with his eyes shut and a smug smile on his face. Muffled grunts and squeals ...
— The Cat in Grandfather's House • Carl Henry Grabo
... "I do not know why, but London is getting on my nerves. It is so hatefully, stubbornly, obstinately imperturbable. I would find another word, but it eludes me. I think you would call it smug. And it is so noisy. Can we not go somewhere for lunch where it is tranquil, where one can rest and get away from ...
— The Double Traitor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... triste and damp, Serving for a laborer's lamp? Have the same mists another side, To be the appanage of pride, Gracing the rich man's wood and lake, His park where amber mornings break, And treacherously bright to show His planted isle where roses glow? O Day! and is your mightiness A sycophant to smug success? Will the sweet sky and ocean broad Be fine accomplices to fraud? O Sun! I curse thy cruel ray! Back, back to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... was like a tomb. The machines were silent. In the office at the end of the room they found an unshaven Charlie gulping a cup of coffee with a very smug-looking Grdznth. The coffee pot was floating gently about six feet above the desk. So were ...
— PRoblem • Alan Edward Nourse
... slowly between her teeth again; it had an extraordinary bitter taste which remained in the mouth. She hated the packet of sweets for its smug, silly ...
— Married Life - The True Romance • May Edginton
... double-beds and primness; of humbug and frankness; of liberty and restraint; of lust and license; of brutal horse-play passing for "wit," and of candour marching with cant. The working classes scarcely called their souls their own; women and children mercilessly exploited by smug profiteers; the "Song of the Shirt"; Gradgrind and Boanerges holding high festival; Tom and Jerry (on their last legs) and Corinthians wrenching off door knockers and upsetting policemen; and Exeter Hall ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... youth, or untried middle-age, A shouting boy, or a sleek-spoken elder, Hot stripling, cool supplanter! I serve not "Under COMINIUS," nay!—yet since he stands There, where I made firm footing amidst chaos, Stands in smug comfort where we Titans struggled— MOLTKE, and I, and the great Emperor,— Struggled for vantage, which he owes to us;— Since he stands there, and I in shadow sit, Silenced and chidden, I half feel I serve, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, VOL. 100. Feb. 28, 1891 • Various
... and honored. It was bad enough to have to flatter Clayton's opponent, to picture him as a noble, disinterested character, ready to sacrifice himself for the public weal. Into his pictures of this man, attired in the long black coat of conventional respectability, with the smug face of pharisaism, he could get nothing but cant and hypocrisy; but in his caricatures of Clayton there was that which pained him worse—disloyalty, untruth, and now and then, to the discerning few who knew the tragedy of Kittrell's soul, ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... political force of incalculable power, in the era which ended with the Civil War. The New Englander of the Middle West, however, ceased to be altogether a Yankee. The lake and prairie plains bred a spirit which contrasted strongly with the smug provincialism of rock-ribbed and sterile New England. The exultation born of wide, unbroken, horizon lines and broad, teeming, prairie landscapes, found expression in the often-quoted saying, "Vermont is the most glorious ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... only for a moment; then he grew thoughtful, then sad; and when he heard me tell Dowley I should have Dickon, the boss mason, and Smug, the boss wheelwright, out there, too, the coal-dust on his face turned to chalk, and he lost his grip. But I knew what was the matter with him; it was the expense. He saw ruin before him; he judged that his financial days were numbered. However, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the King, thirsting for what is interesting and important, to find that "interesting" and "much celebrated" pauperism on his own soil, in conjunction with an opportunity of making people talk about him afresh. How smug he must have felt at the news that henceforth he possessed ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... picturesque, a word which can apply to none other American towns; and although the place is certainly pervaded with an air of decay, 'tis a genteel infirmity, as might be that of a distressed elderly gentlewoman. It has none of the smug mercantile primness of the northern cities, but a look of state, as of quondam wealth and importance, a little gone down in the world, yet remembering still its former dignity. The northern towns, compared with it, are as the spruce citizen rattling by the faded splendors of an old ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... sight of the villa, which looked as tidy, as smug and non-committal as it had done when she first approached it some weeks ago. Alighting quickly from the car, Esther rang the bell and waited, expecting momentarily to see the friendly Jacques answer the summons. There was, however, ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... shocked and grieved him. And then it gave a shade of uncertainty to his own future. He did not know how the estate might be left—how tied up and hedged round by executors and trustees, shutting him out of his present almost proprietorial enjoyment of the place. Some smug London lawyer, perhaps, would put his sleek paw upon everything during the boy's minority. Sir Reginald had never talked to ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... addition to sepulchral sentiment is here the fashion: photographs of the departed set into the stone. You see an elegant and genteel marble cross: there on the pedestal above the name is the photo:—a smug man with bourgeois whiskers,—a militiaman with waxed mustaches well turned up,—a woman well attired and conscious of it: you cannot think how indecent looked the pretension of such types to the dignity of death ...
— An Englishwoman's Love-Letters • Anonymous
... was a bit of a Hotspur. He thought to deal with language as the vehement Percy would have done with the Trent. The smug and silver stream was to be allowed no more ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... transepts he never penetrated because of the charge for admission. The music and the long vista of the fretted roof filled him with a vague and mystical happiness that he had no words, even mispronounceable words, to express. But some of the smug monuments in the aisles got a wreath of epithets: "Metrorious urnfuls," "funererial claims," "dejected angelosity," for example. He wandered about the precincts and speculated about the people who lived in the ripe and cosy houses of grey stone that cluster there so comfortably. Through green ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... beseechingly. Now, as she saw the smug mockery on her captor's face, she fell silent. The futility of any pleading was too plain. Her eyes shifted to the ground again. But the first wild fear was past, and she began to think with some clearness. At once, it occurred to her that she must guard her strength jealously. ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... random goat of poverty browses on the very confines of the scanty, small settlement of cheap gentility where you and your neighbors—people of moderate means like yourself—huddle together in your endless, unceasing struggle for a home and self-respect. You know that your smug, mean little house, tricked out with machine-made scroll-work, and insufficiently clad in two coats of ready-mixed paint, is an eyesore to the poor old gentleman who has sold you a corner of his father's estate to build it on. But there ...
— Jersey Street and Jersey Lane - Urban and Suburban Sketches • H. C. Bunner
... Tom to himself, "if one of these poor devils goes home and murders his wife, who ought to be hung for it? Is it he, or that smug-faced villain behind the bar, who, for the sake of the gain of a few greasy coppers, gives him the poison that maddens him?" He was still pondering over this knotty point when they were ushered into ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... it wearisome the way the army remained so smug in its assumption that God stood right behind it. When worsted on economic grounds—and perhaps driven also from "survival of the fittest" shelter—a pompous retreat could always ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... he was nearly forty years old, he made his first literary hit with Sartor Resartus which called out a storm of caustic criticism. The Germanic style, the elephantine humor, the strange conceits and the sledge-hammer blows at all which the smug English public regarded with reverence—all these features aroused irritation. Four years later came The French Revolution, which established Carlyle's fame as one of the greatest of English writers. From this time on he was freed from the fear of ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... and organ, drowned in the scent of incense and flowers, hung about with scapularies, rosaries, consecrated medals, and holy images, he, like his companions, assumed a certain air of self-importance and wore a smug, sanctified look. He was cold and unbending towards his aunt, who spoke with far too much unconcern about the "great day." Though she had long been in the habit of taking her nephew to Mass every Sunday, she was not "pious." Most likely she confounded in one common detestation the ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... to go in at the front door, confront Reynolds in his smug complacency and drive him out; to demand his place in the world and take it. He could ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... bill; he fought for it and it passed. Then he appeared before Governor Cleveland to argue for it on behalf of the Cigar-Makers' Union. The Governor hesitated, but finally signed it. The Court of Appeals declared it unconstitutional, in a smug and well-fed decision, which spoke unctuously of the "hallowed" influences of the "home." It was a wicked decision, because it was purely academic, and was removed as far as the fixed stars from the actual facts of life. But it had ...
— Theodore Roosevelt and His Times - A Chronicle of the Progressive Movement; Volume 47 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Harold Howland
... vitality. I meet lies every day that, to my certain knowledge, were put to death a hundred years ago, by master hands at the business, too. They ought, in decency at least, to look like pale ghosts 'revisiting the glimpses of the moon,' but they don't. They are smug, comfortable, and somewhat portly, as ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... Mr. Smug, the officer, rolled out this section in a sonorous monotone, without stops, like a clerk of the court. It was his pride to know by heart all the acts relating to his department, and to bring them down upon any obstinate head that he wished to crush. Ginx's head, however, was impervious ...
— Ginx's Baby • Edward Jenkins
... reason of this undeniable provincialism of the English Puritans and Protestant Nonconformists, a provincialism which has two main types,—a bitter type and a smug type,—but which in both its types is vulgarising, and thwarts the full perfection of our humanity? Men of genius and character are born and reared in this medium as in any other. From the faults of the mass such men ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... brutal, sickening! Dull callousness to smug contrition quickening Under the spur of an ignoble terror, A hope scarce less ignoble—in expression, At least. Yes, calm judicial self-possession Is difficult, most easy trimming error; But compromise with claims conflicting here, Is ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, 19 April 1890 • Various
... gentleman, he knew, loved him like a son: he had turned straight to him in his hour of need. This had touched the young man, and had finally made up his mind for him. Moreover Mary, a spoiled little piece who was suffered to set her smug childish will against the combined wills of both her parents, aroused his keenest antipathy. To put her in her place, to teach her that children must obey their parents in the Lord, was a duty to society, to the State. What Uncle ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... best of St. John's belonged to the lodgers, and the best was delightful to tastes that prefer picturesqueness with moderate comfort to smug and dapper luxury. Miss Betsy did our cooking, the school-girls waited upon our table, the boys blacked our boots, "Mam'zel," the French governess from Kilkenny, made our beds when there was no servant, as often happened, birds nested in the ivy of our latticed windows, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... might be a lesson, if anything could, to the bumptious and "efficient" and smug. Time after time I have watched him serving some furred and jewelled customer who was not fit to exchange words with him; I have seen him jostled in a crowded aisle by some parvenu ignoramus who knew not that this quiet little man was one of the immortal ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... former presidents, but the largest painting of all—it was fairly Gargantuan—was of the pork merchant, a large, ruddy gentleman, whom the artist, a keen observer, had painted truly—complacently porcine, benevolently smug. ...
— The Plastic Age • Percy Marks
... astonishing how much every Roebuck in that circle, even the old lady, looked like old Roebuck himself—the same smug piety, the same underfed appearance that, by the way, more often indicates a starved soul than a starved body. One difference—where his face had the look of power that compels respect and, to the shrewd, reveals relentless strength relentlessly ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... it is taken for granted that no Bible-taught Christian ever believed otherwise. Thus the whole testimony of the worshipping, seeking, singing Church on that subject is crisply set aside. The experiential heart-theology of a grand army of fragrant saints is rejected in favor of a smug interpretation of Scripture which would certainly have sounded strange to an Augustine, a Rutherford or ...
— The Pursuit of God • A. W. Tozer
... thing, yet did not rob it of a sense of high adventure; cleansed it of the taints of thrift and selfish concern. In this reaffirmation of vitalism there might be a future, yes, an individual future, yet it was far from the smug conception of salvation. Here was a faith conferred by the freedom of truth; a faith that lost and regained itself in life; it was dynamic in its operation; for, as Lessing said, the searching after truth, and not its possession, gives happiness to man. In the words of an ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... de la bataille...." The good Cardinal would have made a good lawyer. He had as little to say about God and the general righteousness of things as the Bishop of London. But he got in some smug reminders of the severance of diplomatic relations with the Vatican. Perhaps now France will be wiser. He pointed out that the Holy See in its Consistorial Allocution of January 22nd, 1915, invited the belligerents to observe the rules ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... it was that made her think him the handsomest man she had ever seen. She failed. He wasn't at all handsome in the smug fashion associated with the popular interpretation of that term; his features were engagingly irregular of conformation, but the impression they conveyed was of a singular strength together with as rare a fineness of spirit. A mobile and expressive ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... "Don't be smug. It's just another worldful of people with the same old likes, dislikes and hatreds. But they are evolving a way of living together, without violence, that may some day form the key to mankind's survival. They are worth looking ...
— Planet of the Damned • Harry Harrison
... leopard cub, vividly marked. He was muzzled and held in leash by a chain affixed to a stout collar, and Bones, a picture of smug gratification, held the end of ...
— The Keepers of the King's Peace • Edgar Wallace
... beyond measure that young Cowperwood should want to go in with him. He had become aware of late that all of the young, smug newcomers on 'change considered him an old fogy. Here was a strong, brave young Easterner, twenty years his junior, evidently as shrewd as himself—more so, he feared—who actually proposed a business alliance. ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... Innocence—these steeds do gallop for sufficient reason, namely—they are to gallop bidden being ridden, bestridden and chidden by whip and spur applied by certain trusty men o' my company, which men go habited, decked, dressed, clad, guised and disguised as smug, sleek ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... no brief for George W. Stener. In my judgment he is as guilty as his smug co-partner in crime—if not more so—this oily financier who came smiling and in sheep's clothing, pointing out subtle ways by which the city's money could be made profitable for both; but when I hear Mr. Cowperwood described as I have just ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... to pose for me—not for a dime—but for real money. Well, he fell for it. And for all that morning he looked just the way I wanted him to look. But the next morning, having had the spending of certain moneys, he looked too tidy and well fed for Satan. And this morning he was hopeless. He looked smug and fatuous and disgustingly self-satisfied. So I gave him quite a lot of money, not wishing to hurt the creature's feelings, and told him to go away." She looked up, laughing at herself. "Do you know, ...
— The Penalty • Gouverneur Morris
... pedantic narrative, interspersed with fairly amusing anecdotes, that Thomas Day published in 1783, is superb. No matter how familiar it may be, it is simply impossible to avoid laughing anew at the smug little Harry, the sanctimonious tutor, or the naughty Tommy, as Mr. Sambourne has realised them. The "Anecdotes of the Crocodile" and "The Presumptuous Dentist" are no less good. The way he has turned a prosaic hat-rack ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... Syndic. The smug-faced towns-folk whom he met and jostled in the narrow ways, and whose grave starched looks he countered with hot defiant glances—he included them in his anathema. He extended to them the contempt in which he held Blondel and Louis and the rest. They ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... Good idee. Very good idee. Charity and business—what they like. Micky Mahon, his name was. Died o'—I must have it all pat on the tongue. What did he die of, Brand? You're an artful little feller, settin' there so smug and secret like a hen crocodile a-hatchin' h'out ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant
... officiated at these orgies. The visitors, indeed, were by no means of the turbulent stamp of their predecessors; but quiet, mysterious traders, full of nods, and winks, and hieroglyphic signs, with whom, to use their cant phrase, "every thing was smug." Their ships came to anchor at night in the lower bay; and, on a private signal, Vanderscamp would launch his boat, and accompanied solely by his man Pluto, would make them mysterious visits. Sometimes boats pulled in at night, in front of the Wild Goose, and ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... and then paused, glancing rather uncertainly from the detective to Morrow. It needed no keen observer to note the change in the man since the scene of that morning, at Miss Lawton's. He had become a mere shell of his former self. The smug unctuousness was gone; the jaunty side-whiskers drooped; his chalk-like skin fell in flabby folds, and his crafty eyes shifted like ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander
... visitors in town. And they have a historical committee to keep up the fountains and statues—well, I don't care!" Sally interrupted herself with a reluctant smile as Martie laughed. "It makes me sick for Rose to have everything and always be so smug!" ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... shack by the air lock. On the way, thinking about Sattell, he suddenly recovered a completely new memory. On their first wedding anniversary, so long ago, he and his wife had gone out to dinner to celebrate. He remembered how she looked: the almost-smug joy they shared that they would be together for always, with one complete ...
— Scrimshaw • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... science has bestowed in the way of making labor and its surroundings clean and comfortable, healthful and attractive, was to be provided; all that the ignorance and the shortsighted greediness of employers, bent only on immediate profits and keeping their philanthropy for the smug penuriousness and degrading stupidity of charity, deny to their own self-respect and to justice for their brothers in their power. Arthur and he had wrought it all out, had discovered as a crowning vindication that the result would be profitable ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... the Red Lily lagoons, and ridden across the salt-bush plain, and through a deep belt of tall, newly sprung green grass, that hugged the river there just then, and having been greeted by smug, smiling old black fellows, were saluting Jack across two or three hundred feet of water, as ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... The truth—Oh, God! what do you know about the truth? Your business is crawling up into a little power, that you may use it by tantalizing, morally and physically, people a thousand times better than you.... You sit there in your smug authority ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al
... the wood." said Furneaux, sitting back suddenly and nursing his left knee with clasped hands. "I can't control other people's actions, you know. What I insist on to-night is that you shall envisage this affair in its proper light. We have a long way to travel before counsel rises with his smug 'May it please you, me lud, and gentlemen of the jury.' But, having persuaded you to agree that, willy nilly, Miss Doris is the hub of our little universe for the hour, I now swear you and this fire-eater in as assistants. There must be no more speeches, no punching of heads, very little ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy
... interval of disorder. But surely we are not going to let the meeting end in this way. The chairman calls for the next speaker, and he stands forth in the person of a rather smug little shopkeeper, who declares that he knows of no single particular in which the working class needs correction. The speech undeniably falls fiat. Will no one restore ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... the smug face and a slow grin crept over his own, in spite of himself. "Ser Perth, I'm afraid ...
— The Sky Is Falling • Lester del Rey
... the trouble with our whole man-made world, that the game is played with loaded dice? Against the poor, the weak and the unfortunate have the cards been stacked. A tremendous percentage is in favor of the crook, the scoundrel, the smug robber of industry by whom the ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... old gentleman would feel the change more sharply than I. This was, in all probability, the only hat he had. I turned it over and scrutinized it. It was a genteel old beaver, with an air of respectability that was quite convincing. There was nothing smug about it, either. It suggested amiability in the man who had recently possessed it. It suggested also a mild contempt for public opinion, which is always a sign of superior mentality and advanced years. I began to draw a mental portrait of the old man. ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VIII (of X) • Various
... white during that speech and tears came up into her eyes. Tears of helpless exasperation. It was such a cruelly inhuman thing to impose an ideal like that upon a woman. It was so smug, so utterly satisfactory to all romantic sentimentalists. Wallace would approve every word of it. Wallace had sent him to say just this;—was waiting now to be told the ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... been kindled, and ahead of him, massed above the housetops, the blue-grey clouds of evening hung. He watched the faces of the people as they passed, some eager, some jaded, some pleasure-seeking, some smug, and he strove to conjecture their aim in life. At the Circus he paused awhile, breathing deep and filling out his lungs with fragrance of violets and narcissi, which flower-girls clamoured for him to purchase. He bought a bunch and smiled faintly, contrasting the beautiful ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... forefathers; yet life is much the same now as then, the devil goeth up and down in the world, spirits, daemons, and the thousand powers of darkness abide with us still, though to-day they go by different names, for there is no man in this smug, complacent age of ours, but carries within him a power of evil greater or less, according to his intellect. Scratch off the social veneer, lift but a corner of the very decent cloak of our civilization, ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... man made a period on his note-book and drew his pencil away with a precise movement. He looked at the Masked Lady with a smug smile. "That word snitch," he said. "It's entirely out of place, you know—after you've once introduced Aladdin and Hansel and Grettel in your story. And a giant. It's slang, and it came into use long after the race ...
— Everychild - A Story Which The Old May Interpret to the Young and Which the Young May Interpret to the Old • Louis Dodge
... the guest. "The big one might shut off some of you from my devouring eyes." He was mixing ingredients in a chafing-dish as he spoke, and he wore the trying air of smug complacency that invariably accompanies that ...
— The Girl in the Mirror • Elizabeth Garver Jordan
... his leader, a man of great fame, was less tense in his watchfulness, amazingly at his ease with the Court, and on smiling terms with the President, who, full of worldly and unworldly knowledge, held the balance of justice with an unwavering firmness. The jury looked startlingly commonplace, smug and sleepy, despite the variety of type almost inevitably presented by twelve human beings. Not one of them looked a rascal; not one of them looked an actively good man. The intense Englishness of them hit one in the face like ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... There was not a particle of the professional street-singer about Baubie Wishart, the child of that species being generally clean-washed, or at least soapy, of face, with lank, smooth-combed and greasy hair; and usually, too, with a smug, sanctimonious air of meriting a better fate. Baubie Wishart presented none of these characteristics: her face was simply filthy; her hair was a red-brown, loosened tangle that reminded one painfully of oakum in its first stage. And she looked as if she ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... whenever a ship touched at Maduro, the Hawaiian native teacher, Lilo, always haunted Mac-pherson's house, and every trader and trading skipper detested this teacher above all others. Macpherson liked him and said he was "earnest," the other white men called him and believed him to be, a smug-faced and sponging hypocrite. ...
— Rodman The Boatsteerer And Other Stories - 1898 • Louis Becke
... sound a little—smug?" Canby asked timidly. "The way we've got him now, Roderick seems to me to be always seeing himself as a splendid man and sort of ...
— Harlequin and Columbine • Booth Tarkington
... madness, and hunger gnawed at his life strings. One night, with twitching fingers and face drawn white with pain, he turned away from the crowded streets towards Westminster, sank into a seat, and, picking up the half of a newspaper, read the smug little account of a journalist who had spent a few hours a day perhaps in the slums. As he read he laughed softly to himself, and then, clutching the paper in his hands, he walked away to the Embankment, up Northumberland ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim
... profile was exceedingly handsome. But in the full view Andy saw nothing except a grisly, purple scar that twisted down beneath the right eye of the man. It drew down the lower lid of that eye, and it pulled the mouth of the man a bit awry, so that he seemed to be smiling in a smug, half-apologetic manner. In spite of his youth he was unquestionably the dominant spirit here. Once or twice the others lifted their voices in argument, and a single word from him cut them short. And when he raised his head, now and again, to look at Andy, it gave the latter a feeling that his ...
— Way of the Lawless • Max Brand
... had seized upon it and made millions out of it! Here was a "trance medium," who had got a fortune out of an imbecile old manufacturer; here was a great newspaper proprietor, who published advertisements of assignations at a dollar a line; here was a cigar manufacturer, whose smug face was upon every billboard—he had begun as a tin manufacturer, and to avoid the duty, he had had his raw material cast in the form of statues, and brought them in ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... spotlight, sallying forth into the wide world—and a little gay and thrilled. The morning was coming steadily up the sky; the daily miracle was going on. And she was going on—on! Old Sally's scoldings didn't matter, nor Marty's smug confidence. She shivered a little but kept her eyes on ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... say that," remarked George when Buster made such a remark; "but I don't believe it, judging from the smug way your belt hugs you just now. I rather think you are fond of seeing things ...
— Motor Boat Boys Mississippi Cruise - or, The Dash for Dixie • Louis Arundel
... occasional local "stirrings of the heart," at the beginning of the second quarter of the eighteenth century a cold, formal piety was frequently the covering of indifferent living and of a smug, complacent Christianity, wherein the letter killed and the spirit did not give life. This was true all over New England, and elsewhere. Nor was this deadness confined to the colonies alone, for the Wesleys were soon to stir ...
— The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut • M. Louise Greene, Ph. D.
... contrasts—of gray women of the night hugging gratings for warmth and accosting passers-by with loathsome gestures, of smug civilians hiding sensuous mouths under great mustaches, of dapper soldiers to whom the young girl unattended was potential prey, into this night city of terror, this day city of frightful contrasts, ermine rubbing elbows with frost-nipped ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... and circled, where the rain fell and the wind called with a passionate cadence among the hills. To marry Franklin Kane—would it not be to abandon the past; would it not be to desecrate it and make it hers no longer? Was not the solitary moorland better, the anguish and despair better than the smug, warm, sane life of purpose and endeavour? If she was too tired, too indifferent, if she acquiesced, if she married Franklin Kane, would she forget that the reallest thing in her life had not been its sanity, and its purpose, but its wild, its secret, its broken-hearted love? Surely the hateful wisdom ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... setting him on fire. And the fire was burning away the smug complacency which had come to him during his long ...
— Black Jack • Max Brand
... ghostly revelations might pass between this dead scion of the Dorntons lying on the trestles before them and the obscure, nameless ticket of leave man awaiting his entrance in the vault below! The incongruity of this thought, with the smug complacency of the worldly minded congregation sitting around him, and the probable smiling carelessness of the reckless rover—the cause of all—even now idly pacing the deck on the distant sea, touched him with horror. And when added ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... said Lee, but he got no rejoinder to that. He looked at the company, and his small, smug, fatuous face, which was somewhat pale and haggard, frowned with astonishment. Again he looked for information into Carroll's unanswering face. He looked at an empty chair near him; then he looked at Carroll and his sister standing, and did not seat himself. He ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... same thought never occurs twice,—more justly, perhaps, as no thought ever occurs at all, there was a physical impossibility that the same thought should recur, It is long since I saw and read these inscriptions; but I remember the impression was of a smug usher at his desk in the intervals of instruction, levelling his pen. Of death, as it consists of dust and worms, and mourners and uncertainty, he had never thought; but the word "death" he had often seen separate and conjunct with other words, ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... strait and few, Thinly dieted on dew, I will use the world, and sift it, To a thousand humors shift it, As you spin a cherry. O doleful ghosts, and goblins merry! O all you virtues, methods, mights, Means, appliances, delights, Reputed wrongs and braggart rights, Smug routine, and things allowed, Minorities, things under cloud! Hither! take me, use me, fill me, Vein and artery, though ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... actual; and in the world as it is, meliorism, not optimism, is the true opposite of pessimism. Optimist and pessimist are both alike in a sense, seeing they are both conservative; they sit down contented—the first with the smug contentment that says "All's well; I have enough; why this fuss about others?" the second with the contentment of blank despair that says, "All's hopeless; all's wrong; why try uselessly to mend it?" The ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... to strike the smug Pharisee in the face, and in order to conquer that unwomanly impulse I hurried out of the office, and into the street, leaving poor Mildred to ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... bondage of her people, for some agonizing cry about her native land. In two poems she refers definitely to Africa as her home, but in each instance there seems to be under the sentiment of the lines a feeling of almost smug contentment at her own escape therefrom. In the poem, "On Being Brought from Africa to America," ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... by no means a large class—the grave, dignified, self-possessed, well-mannered waiter; smooth-shaven, spotlessly clean, noiseless, smug and attentive. He generally walks with a slight limp, an infirmity due to his sedentary habits and his long acquaintance with his several employers' decanters. He is never under fifty, is round of form, short in the legs, broad of shoulder, and wears his gray hair cut close. He has had ...
— The Underdog • F. Hopkinson Smith
... being all unlearned in the game of psycho-analysis, to explain how this thing happened. I concern myself only with facts. Suddenly the pretty veil of self-satisfaction was rent from top to bottom, and Dickson saw a figure of himself within, a smug leaden little figure which simpered and preened itself and was hollow as a rotten nut. And ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... the columns of every newspaper. Daily its bells toll. Its melancholy pageantry traverses the streets of wealthy quarters, and it stalks abroad hourly in the slums, and few there are who gaze after it. But here it comes so seldom that its dread features are not made smug by familiarity. When Hite was told to look again at the face and see if memory might not have played him false, to make sure he had never seen the man before yesterday, he hesitated, and advanced with ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... lair of the Smell, from which it leered smug defiance at the sea-sweet atmosphere of the lower city—occupied a walled-in arch of the Brooklyn Bridge, fronting on Frankfort Street, in that part of Town still known to elder inhabitants as "the Swamp." Above rumbled the everlasting inter-borough traffic; to the ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... where I have been entreating—and vainly entreating—succor from yet another monkish king, the holy Lewis of that realm. Eh, what is God about when He enthrones these whining pieties! Were I a king, were I even a man, I would drive these smug English out of their foggy isle in three days' space! I would leave alive not one of these curs that dare yelp at me! I would—" She paused, anger veering into amusement. "See how I enrage myself when I think of what your people have ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell
... the Burgundy without a trace upon his round, smug face of the indignation surging within him. His skilled hand replenished Sperry's ...
— The Lady of Big Shanty • Frank Berkeley Smith
... seen his work. It is much sought after by certain amateurs now. He began by being revolutionary in his art, and ended by becoming a revolutionist, after his wife and child had died in want and misery. He used to say that the bourgeoisie, the smug, overfed lot, had killed them. That was his real belief. He still worked at his art and led a double life. He was tall, gaunt, and swarthy, with a long, brown beard and deep-set eyes. You must have seen ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... grounds she worked out her plans, leisurely adding something year by year, a little Dutch garden, sweeping walks and lawns, a wonderful terraced rose-garden with a stone pergola at the upper end, where the creepers were never trimmed into smug stiffness, but grew in wild luxuriance at their own sweet will, and soon they made a glorious tangle of sweet-smelling blooms and glossy green leaves. From the living-room windows one looked out over a broad expanse of mossy lawn; groups of vermilion-coloured ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... for you, Brenton, I wonder you're not as bad as Baalam's ass. If they could have their way, they would strip you of your clerical broadcloth and robe you in a full suit of angelic eider down. Still, you needn't look smug, while you deny it; it's nothing to be proud about. It's not your preaching does it, man; it's chiefly on account of your voice, and the way your hair sprouts from your scalp. For pure purposes of religion, a hairy baritone is a long way more ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... their coffee-shops and, supposedly, in some degree the gin-palaces, which however, mostly existed in the picturesque vocabulary of the "smug" reformer. ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... him, the smug snob of virtue. You may find him a professor at the university; you may find him leading prayer-meetings and preaching pure politics; you may find him the bloodless philanthropist; you may find him a rank atheist, with his patents for the bringing in of his own kingdom ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... the stewards of the day's dinner, according to old-fashioned rite, have wands put into their hands, walk to church at the head of the procession, and sit there in places of honor. The boys are already in their seats, with smug fresh faces and shining white collars; the old black-gowned pensioners are on their benches; the chapel is lighted, and Founder's tomb, with its grotesque carvings, monsters, heraldries, darkles and shines with the most wonderful shadows and lights. There he lies, Fundator Noster, in his ruff ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... altogether fixt to perish there, If thou indeed hast purposed with that throng To mix, whose riot and outrageous acts 400 Of violence echo through the vault of heav'n. None, such as thou, serve them; their servitors Are youths well-cloak'd, well-vested; sleek their heads, And smug their countenances; such alone Are their attendants, and the polish'd boards Groan overcharg'd with bread, with flesh, with wine. Rest here content; for neither me nor these Thou weariest aught, and when Ulysses' ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer
... eliminated as a UFO source, the idea of interplanetary spaceships was becoming more popular. During 1948 the people in ATIC were openly discussing the possibility of interplanetary visitors without others tapping their heads and looking smug. During 1948 the novelty of UFO's had worn off for the press and every John and Jane Doe who saw one didn't make the front pages as in 1947. Editors were becoming hardened, only a few of the best reports got any ...
— The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects • Edward Ruppelt
... period of smug selfcongratulation was soon succeeded by a strange nostalgia which took the form of romanticizing the lost land. American books were reprinted in vast quantities in the Englishspeaking nations and translated anew in other countries. ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... of diet, no physical exercise, no "reducicle" could have achieved the extraordinary alteration in Mr. Magnus' appearance that was in fact induced by his anxiety over his prospective prosecution of Higgleby. Whereas erstwhile he had been smug and condescending, complacent, lethargic and ponderous, he now became drawn, nervous, apprehensive and obsequious. Moreover, he was markedly thinner. He was obviously on a decline, caused by sheer funk. Speak sharply to him and he ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train
... all its forms had inspired Average Jones with a profound contempt and dislike for the cruelest of all forms of swindling medical quackery. And this swollen, smug-faced intruder looked a particularly offensive specimen of his kind. Therefore the Ad-Visor ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... so smug and bright, One day, that I made bold To ask him what he did each night With all his ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... then, after long periods of silence, that the labor movement puts in its claim for notice. All is quiet. The kind old world spins on, and the bourgeois masters clip their coupons in smug complacency. But the grim and silent forces are ...
— War of the Classes • Jack London
... this man very much, and treated him with the greatest harshness and scorn. He would thrust him, like a cur, over his threshold, and would even spit on him. Shylock submitted to all these indignities with a patient shrug; but deep in his heart he cherished a desire for revenge on the rich, smug merchant. For Antonio both hurt his pride and injured his business. "But for him," thought Shylock, "I should be richer by half a million ducats. On the market place, and wherever he can, he denounces the rate of interest I charge, and—worse than ...
— Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare • E. Nesbit
... freshman," not as tall, as heavy nor as old as Bert, catch the assailant's hard-driven fist in the palm of an instantly extended hand and then let drive with his own right a neat, short-arm uppercut that got Bert just where he had meant to get Gus, was a needed lesson to the smug conceit that too often goes with added school years. Bert, from a seat on the floor, which he had taken without choice of the spot, regarded his opponent through half-closed eyes with a certain nonchalance, his anger ...
— Radio Boys Loyalty - Bill Brown Listens In • Wayne Whipple
... of his pupil, it was a good while before he got the point of view, so little had he been prepared for it by the smug young barbarians to whom the tradition of tutorship, as hitherto revealed to him, had been adjusted. Morgan was scrappy and surprising, deficient in many properties supposed common to the genus and abounding ...
— The Pupil • Henry James
... for himself through the great mob on the way through life! Are we the same men now that wrote those inscriptions—that read those poems? that delivered or heard those essays and speeches so simple, so pompous, so ludicrously solemn; parodied so artlessly from books, and spoken with smug chubby faces, and such an admirable aping of wisdom and gravity? Here is the book before me: it is scarcely fifteen years old. Here is Jack moaning with despair and Byronic misanthropy, whose career at the university was one of unmixed milk-punch. Here is Tom's daring Essay in defence ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... The Life and Death of the merry Devill of Edmonton, with the pleasant Prancks of Smug the smith, Sir John, and mine Host of the George, about the stealing of Venison, frontispiece, 4to. ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... from Paris. My family scampered out and away and we followed leisurely after. Fontainebleau is quite smug. There is a fashionable hotel near the station, before which a fine tall fellow in uniform parades. He looked at our basket with contempt, and we looked at him in pity. Just beyond the hotel are smart shops with windows filled with many-colored trifles to tempt the tourist. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... and the Lieutenant-Governor adjoined. Each had its ante-room, in which a private secretary wrote eternally at a roll-top desk, an excessively plain-featured stenographer rattled the keys of his typewriter, and a smug-faced page yawned over a newspaper, or scanned the cards of visitors with the air of an official censor. At intervals, an electric bell whirred once, twice, or three times; and, according to the signal, one of the trio disappeared into the presence ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... was a worthy silk-mercer of the Rue des Bourdonnais, stout and substantial, a judge in the commercial court, a father of four children, and the husband of a second wife. At the age of fifty-six, with a cap of gray hair on his head, he had the smug appearance of a man who has his eighty thousand francs of income; and having been forced to put up with a good deal that he did not like in the way of business, has fully made up his mind to enjoy the rest of his life, and not to quit this earth until he has had his share of cakes ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... tell Clarence that—about Wednesday night," Rachael said, downing with some effort an impulse to ask Florence not to be so smug. ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... degradation I was rescued by a philanthropist, who had me fed and clothed and educated. I had at his hands every chance of leading a respectable life, but I did not want to become smug and honest. My early training was too strong for that, so after a year or two of enforced goodness I ran away to sea. The vessel I embarked on as a stowaway was bound for America. When I was discovered ...
— The Silent House • Fergus Hume
... subsequent ambitions appeared even worse. For the first time, he perceived his own consummate selfishness set over against the shining renunciations of his mother. Then, step by step, he followed his career in Brookville: his smug satisfaction in his own good looks; his shallow pride and vanity over the vapid insincerities he had perpetrated Sunday after Sunday in the shabby pulpit of the Brookville church; his Pharisaical relations with his people; his utter misunderstanding of their needs. All this proved ...
— An Alabaster Box • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Florence Morse Kingsley
... the speaker. Squat, stout, heavy jowled—with a neck that pushed over the back of his collar—a follower of the ring, smug, assertive, confident. A prophet? I was not ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... vacation. "Vacation!" The word was not in his vocabulary. "Business! "That, too, was a corpse of a word floating on the still waters of past usage. "Money, stocks, bonds, market-reports!" They seemed like forgotten enemies rising to stop him. How could Delbridge smile in his smug way, as he chewed his cigar and boasted of a new club of which he was the president? How could Wright put up with his moderate salary and stand all day at that prison window? What could the limp, pale-faced stenographers ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... cased in steel, and, upon very slight provocation, were wont to smite each other with axes, and clubs, to buffet and skewer each other with spears, lances, swords, and divers other barbarous engines, yet, in that dark, and doughty age, ignorant though they were of all those smug maxims, and excellent moralities with which we are so happily blessed,—even in that unhallowed day, when the solemn tread of the policeman's foot was all unknown,—they had evolved for themselves a code of rules whereby to govern their life, ...
— The Money Moon - A Romance • Jeffery Farnol
... greeting almost cordial in comparison with the cold bow which the two colleagues exchanged at the Chamber, an "I was expecting you" in which perhaps an intention showed itself, the lawyer pointed the Nabob into a seat near his desk, told the smug domestic in black not to come till he was summoned, arranged a few papers, after which, sinking into his arm-chair with the attitude of a man ready to listen, who becomes all ears, his legs crossed, he rested his chin on his hand, with his eyes fixed on a great rep curtain falling to ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... naturally with one of our number, when I noticed him turn and speak a few words to the sergeant of the guard, who turned and entered the guardroom, evidently in a hurry. Knowing that this Pohlman, in spite of his oily manner and smug appearance, was a Hun in every sense of the word, I kept my weather eye open, warned the others and strolled off. A few seconds later four of the worst sentries in the place, having entered the camp unobserved, came running round ...
— 'Brother Bosch', an Airman's Escape from Germany • Gerald Featherstone Knight
... will show you no mercy," he answered quietly, "for I have sworn to show no mercy to your race, and you are the last of it. But listen, that for a few moments before you die you may shake off your smug complacency and learn what this wealth is, and what kind of brood you Trenoweths are. Dog! The treasure that lies by Dead Man's Rock is treasure weighted with dead men's curses and stained with dead men's blood—wealth won by black piracy upon the high seas—gold for which many a ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... in the Christian virtues of unselfishness, generosity, charity, and humility, without ever connecting them in their minds with Christ; and at the same time what they did associate with Christianity was just on a par with the formalism and smug self-righteousness which Christ spent His whole life in trying to destroy. . . . The men really had deep-seated beliefs in goodness. . . . They never connected the goodness in which they believed with the God in Whom the chaplains ...
— With Our Soldiers in France • Sherwood Eddy
... always has been and always will be free. If you chain love down under smug rules you only kill it or distort it. I am not arguing against marriage, but against hypocrisy. We may as well recognize that sex desire is so strong ...
— Possessed • Cleveland Moffett
... lady, saying, simply, that you cannot get it discounted. Leave the rest to me, and I think the bill you have indorsed to Sparkle will be paid." Comforted by this assurance, Axminster, fearfully changed from the nervous, but smug, hopeful man of the morning, departed. It now remained for me to exert what skill I possessed, to bring about the desired result. I lost no time in writing a letter to the Honorable Miss Snape, of which the following ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... had followed the Kaiser's attitudes and their reflections preceeding the war in the German military party, were struck by a strange blending of martial glory and Christian compunction. No one prays more loudly than the hypocrite and none so smug as the devil when ...
— History of the American Negro in the Great World War • W. Allison Sweeney
... as stink, for Vulpes can hardly now make a crawl of it; and ere he, they, whipper-in, or any one of the other three demoniacs, have time to look in one another's splashed faces, he is torn into a thousand pieces, gobbled up in the general growl; and smug, and smooth, and dry, and warm, and cozey, as he was an hour and twenty-five minutes ago exactly, in his furze bush in the cover,—he is now piece-meal, in about thirty distinct stomachs; and is he not, pray, well off for sepulture?— ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 330, September 6, 1828 • Various
... walked rapidly to the window which looked out on the garden. It was a small and somewhat smug suburban garden; the flower beds a little too neat and like the pattern of a coloured carpet; but on this shining and opulent summer day even they had the exuberance of something natural, I had almost said tropical. In the middle of a bright and verdant but painfully circular lawn stood two figures. ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton
... answer, while the maggots madden me. "I know you for what you are, and I am unafraid. Under your mask of hedonism you are yourself the Noseless One and your way leads to the Night. Hedonism has no meaning. It, too, is a lie, at best the coward's smug compromise." ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
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